The Last Goodbye

by Fiona Lucas

But it seemed that if she was going to fall from grace this evening, she was going to do it spectacularly. Maybe it was because she saw the time at the top of the phone change to a row of perfect nothingness that she did it. Maybe it was all the swelling emotions inside her from that evening clamoring to be let out. Who knew? All Anna understood was that all the words she thought she’d have a lifetime to say were stuck in the logjam of her throat and then, suddenly, three escaped. They would have to be enough.

  “I love you . . .” she whispered in a voice that was raw with tears.

  There was a heartbeat of silence, then another.

  And then the reply came.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Chapter Four

  Sometimes, waking up is like emerging from a gentle, white fog. Slowly, the mist clears, and one finds oneself refreshed and ready to face the morning, seeing and thinking clearly. Unfortunately for Anna, waking up the following day was more like the aftermath of being buried alive in an avalanche. Her sleep had been blessedly blank and white, but it felt as if something heavy was sitting on her chest, pinning her to the bed, and she couldn’t quite make sense of her surroundings. She lay there, unable to move, unable to think. Eventually, she began to punch herself free.

  The first step was to get her eyelids open. She blinked a few times and just about managed, even though one eye was being more cooperative than the other, and turned to focus on the clock, but where she’d expected to see a digital display, there was now an old-fashioned alarm clock with bells on the top and little brass feet.

  Even though the thick curtains were drawn, only barely emitting light, she realized the window was in the wrong place. It should have been on the right side of the room, but it was clearly on the left.

  She sat up in bed, frowning, and then—finally—it all began to fall into place. She wasn’t in her bedroom, but the spare room. She rubbed a hand over her gritty eyes and her stomach lurched.

  Oh, God. Last night . . . The phone call.

  She didn’t even remember hearing Spencer’s voicemail greeting, she realized, only what had come afterward—the voice, the one that had spoken where there should have been only emptiness and silence.

  When she’d heard it, she’d immediately thrown the phone into the far reaches of the wardrobe, then had half crawled, half scrabbled her way across the bedroom floor until she’d reached the opposite wall, where she’d sat with her back pressed up against it, her knees pulled up against her body, staring at the open wardrobe as if a ghostly apparition might emerge at any second. At some point, she’d stopped shaking enough to stand up, stumble from the room and make it across the hallway, where she’d collapsed into this bed and, if the bedclothes were anything to go by, had slept fitfully and frantically.

  She’d had all sorts of strange dreams after Spencer had died, ones where they’d been living their normal lives, and they had seemed so real that waking up again had been like being back in those first awful days after the accident. And then there were the nightmares . . .

  But the dreams weren’t always bad. Sometimes, in that twilight between sleeping and waking, she’d imagine him there in the bed beside her, warm and solid and alive. Once or twice she was sure she’d felt his breath on her back, his fingers brushing her thigh, but when she’d woken up properly his side of the bed had been cool and unwrinkled. She’d assumed it was her subconscious refusing to accept the truth, trying to fill the gaping hole he’d left behind.

  Had last night been something like that? She’d been upset leaving the party. It could have triggered something . . .

  Anna pondered the idea as she shifted position, realizing she’d got distracted and hadn’t actually registered the time on the alarm clock. She turned her head to take another look.

  Eleven thirty-two? She sprang out of bed.

  She was supposed to be having a New Year’s Day lunch with Spencer’s parents at half past twelve, and it was a forty-five-minute drive to Epsom—at the very least. That meant she had to get into the car, well, now!

  But one quick glance in the mirror confirmed that plan was a bust before it had even got underway. She was still wearing the same wrinkled black dress from the night before, her tights had a ladder that started under her heel and disappeared up under her hemline and her hair looked as if she’d been caught in a hurricane.

  There was no time to analyze what had happened last night now. She had to get herself in the shower and dressed in a presentable manner in under fifteen minutes, and then, even if she flirted with the speed limit all the way to Epsom, she was still going to be cutting it really fine.

  Spencer’s mum was a stickler about punctuality, and Anna always made sure to turn up to their fortnightly Sunday lunches on the dot of half past twelve, even if they never ate until one. While Spencer had been famously late for everything, and Anna couldn’t remember one family function she’d been to with him where they hadn’t arrived at least half an hour after they were supposed to, Gayle seemed to hold her daughter-in-law to a different standard.

  Maybe that was because the lunches had started not long after Spencer had died, a way to support each other through that awful time, to laugh and cry and remember him, and the tradition had just kept going, no one brave enough to suggest otherwise. Being late would have seemed disrespectful.

  By noon, Anna had got a grip of herself and made it into her car. By twenty past, she was joining the M25 and putting her foot down. It was raining hard, that horrible, cold, icy stuff that would have been sleet if the temperature had been a degree or two cooler. She put the windshield wipers on max and forced herself to overtake a few cars and trucks instead of hugging the slow lane, as she usually would have done in such weather. However, the journey was a familiar one, and it wasn’t long before she was driving mostly on automatic pilot, allowing her thoughts to wander.

  What had really happened last night?

  There really were only two possibilities: either she’d heard the voice on the phone—Spencer’s voice?—for real, or she’d thought she’d heard it. Neither scenario calmed her down much—option one was just too “out there” to consider, and option two meant she was starting off the New Year by having a nervous breakdown.

  Because he hadn’t just said any old words, had he? He’d said, “I beg your pardon?” Their words, their thing.

  Had she just wanted to hear it come back to her so badly that she’d imagined it? It had to be that. She’d been running off emotion last night, even before she’d got home and ended up curled up on the floor of her dead husband’s wardrobe. Look at how she’d spoken to Gabi . . .

  Oh, God. Gabi!

  She’d forgotten to call her last night to apologize. She was a horrible, horrible friend!

  Anna was usually a very careful driver, so much so that Spencer had taken to calling her “Grandma” when she’d got behind the wheel, but she swerved onto the hard shoulder and brought the car to a stop. This was an emergency. Her handbag was on the passenger seat, and she delved into it with her left hand and started rummaging around. It was only when her fingers reached the lining at the bottom that she realized her mistake.

  Her phone was still sitting in the bottom of the wardrobe, where she’d thrown it after the call. As bad as she felt about Gabi, there was nothing she could do about it now. It would have to wait until she got home later that afternoon.

  Anna squinted at the road ahead, indicated and pulled back into the traffic. The voice—his voice—replayed itself inside her head as she did so.

  I beg your pardon?

  Just what Spencer would have said, but it hadn’t been filled with barely contained laughter or the husky softness she would have expected. He’d sounded so serious, so sad. As if he’d been aching every bit as badly as she had at their separation.

  That made sense, in a weird way. But also, it didn’t. Why, if she’d invented it, hadn’t she imagined Spencer’s usual cheeky tone? That was what she’d been yearning to hear, after all, his very Spencerness, captured
in an inflection, a nuance, to hear the smile in his words. Why had she made him sound so mournful?

  Spencer would have laughed at her for letting her imagination run away with her, but was it really so ridiculous? They’d always said their love was special. Once, when they’d been at a dinner party and one of his friends had said he’d want his wife to move on and marry again if something happened to him, Spencer had quipped that he wasn’t that generous, that he’d find a way to come back because Anna was his and always would be his. What if he’d found a way to do that? No one really knew what happened after you’d died, did they? It was the one area where science could never prod its curious fingers. What if something beautiful, something impossible, had occurred?

  No, she told herself. Just no.

  It couldn’t be true. Because what was she going to do if it was? March into her in-laws’ house for lunch and calmly announce that she’d had a chat with their dearly departed son the night before? It sounded ridiculous. It was ridiculous.

  Okay, good. Anna released a shaky breath. Putting it in context like that helped. So what if it hadn’t all been a dream? That didn’t mean all of it had been real either. It was probably a mixture of reality, imagination and emotion—that was what she was going to tell herself if she started freaking out about it again. And she would keep telling herself that all the way through lunch that afternoon.

  Chapter Five

  What I could really do with, more than anything else, Anna thought, as she arrived at Spencer’s parents’ house and killed the engine, is a hug, plain and simple. She wished she were pulling up to her own parents’ house, that it was her mother who would dry her hands on a tea towel and come running to the front door to greet her, but that wasn’t possible. Not unless she wanted to jump on a plane and travel almost three thousand miles.

  Her parents had moved to Canada not long after she and Spencer had married. Anna’s mother worked as a conference center manager for an international chain of hotels, and the kind of position she’d been working toward her whole career had come up. The only snag? It was in Nova Scotia. Anna’s father had just retired from being a civil engineer, and their only child was settled, so they had taken the leap. The plan was to move back to the UK when her mum retired. Anna visited, of course, and they had Skype calls regularly, but it wasn’t quite the same. You couldn’t hug a screen.

  Anna ran from her car and rang the Barrys’ front doorbell. Quarter past one. She’d never been this late before.

  Gayle answered. She smiled at Anna, but there was a stiffness in her posture as she leaned in and kissed her briefly on the cheek. No hug was forthcoming. “You’re running a bit late,” she said, taking in Anna’s woolly sweater and jeans, which were definitely not as smart as her usual family lunch attire, but Anna had barely had time to find anything clean, let alone iron anything.

  “Um . . . yes. Traffic was a bit bad.” She nodded toward the rain, still falling in large, icy drops beyond the overhang of the porch.

  “Well, we managed to hold off a bit,” Gayle said, opening the door wide. “But you’re here in the nick of time—we were just about to sit down.” And she led the way through the house to the large dining room that overlooked the garden. Spencer’s older brother, Scott, was already there, helping to carry covered dishes in from the kitchen. Anna always felt a little jab in her ribs every time she saw him. He looked so much like his younger sibling. Both boys had inherited their mother’s fair hair and blue eyes, although Spencer had always looked the more boyish. Scott’s features were sharper, his expression naturally more somber.

  He and his wife had announced just before Christmas that she was expecting their first child at the end of May. Teresa gave Anna a little nod as she arrived from the kitchen, carrying a dish full of stuffing balls. Anna couldn’t help looking at her stomach, trying to work out if there were the beginnings of a bump there under her loose top. While she was overjoyed for the couple, she felt a little flush of envy every time she thought about it.

  She tried to help but was shooed away, so she slid into her normally assigned seat at the bottom of the table. Spencer’s dad, Richard, winked at Anna, making her feel slightly less as if she had her tail between her legs for being late. Spencer had taken after his father, a man who had, apparently, been telling “dad jokes” well before he’d actually become a dad. Anna gave him a conspiratorial smile back and felt her shoulder muscles unclench.

  When lunch was over, they retired to the living room. This was Anna’s favorite part of the afternoon. The tradition had started right after Spencer had died. To while away the hours doing something other than drinking endless cups of tea, they’d looked through the photo albums together, trying to pick a few for the upcoming funeral.

  It hadn’t been an easy job to narrow it down to just a couple. With his mischievous blue eyes and boyish grin, Spencer had been very photogenic. And even after the funeral, they’d kept going with it. It had been comforting to see him smiling back from the pages at them, just being Spencer. It still was.

  Gayle went to the special shelf on the bookcase that contained the large albums, all arranged in date order, and pulled one from the left-hand end.

  Toddler pics? Again? It seemed an awfully long time since they’d looked at anything from the other end of the shelf, from any of the albums Anna might have a chance of featuring in, and she really could do with seeing some solid evidence of her time together with Spencer today, because everything seemed to be upside down and back-to-front. An anchor of some sort might have been helpful.

  She nodded along as usual anyway as Gayle leafed through the album, making the appropriate noises at the right times, and it wasn’t hard to do because she did love seeing all these favorite pictures of her husband—the one of him on top of a lion in Trafalgar Square, or the one of him with the snowman he’d built in the back garden.

  Anna looked over at her mother-in-law, with her perfectly coiffed, Mary Berry–style hairdo, her erect posture and precise movements. Her fierce loyalty and protectiveness toward her family were truly admirable, but they came with a downside. Gayle was the sort of mother who believed no woman was good enough for her baby boys, and it had taken a while for Anna not to feel like an outsider at family gatherings.

  But after Spencer had died, that had changed. Gayle had clung to her, opened her arms and welcomed Anna into the family in a way she never had before. They were united in their loss, their grief. She’d needed Anna. Both Scott and Richard didn’t do emotion, one buttoning down hard, the other finding safety in humor when things got too much, so Anna had been the one person Gayle had been able to talk to. They’d cried and laughed and remembered together.

  Anna’s parents had come to stay as soon as they could after Spencer had died. They’d even offered to move back to England permanently, but Anna had refused, telling them they couldn’t put their lives on hold indefinitely for her. However, once they’d actually left, she’d realized how much it had helped having someone else in the house. She knew one or both of them would have dropped everything again if she’d told them she was feeling lonely, but that wouldn’t have been fair on them. So having this new, closer connection with Gayle had meant everything.

  Once the photo albums were put away, a conversation began about how they’d all spent New Year’s Eve, but nobody lingered on their tales, because it was glaringly obvious that someone was missing from all of them. To make up for that, Scott relayed a story about the millennium New Year, when they’d had a big reunion with Gayle’s side of the family. Anna had heard the anecdote countless times before, but it still made her smile. Fifteen-year-old Spencer had crept out of a long and boring dinner and lit five hundred pounds’ worth of fireworks meant for midnight while the rest of the family were still enjoying their desserts. He was lucky he hadn’t blown himself to kingdom come.

  Anna glanced across the table and saw Gayle smiling widely, but her eyes were glittering, and she kept looking down at her dinner as the others laughed and delved into
the memory in greater detail. She suspected her mother-in-law was thinking exactly the same thing as her: that it seemed so unfair. Everyone had always joked that Spencer’s reckless side would be his undoing, so it seemed wrong that he’d been minding his own business, sensibly walking across the road, when the end had come. It made his death even harder to bear.

  When there was a gap in the conversation, Anna said, “What about that night when Spencer stayed in and missed going up to London with everyone because Lewis was sick? He wasn’t always impossible.”

  “God, I loved that dog,” Richard chipped in, smiling. “Only one in this household who took me seriously!”

  Gayle turned to face Anna. “Did Spencer tell you about that?”

  “No.”

  “But you weren’t on the scene then, were you?”

  Anna took a moment before she answered. She didn’t want to contradict her mother-in-law, but she wasn’t going to lie. “We’d only just got together. It was all very new.”

  Gayle frowned. “I don’t think you were.” And she went on to supplant Anna’s story with one of her own.

  Anna stayed quiet. She knew she was right, because that had been her and Spencer’s first New Year’s Eve together. They’d spent it here in this house, cuddled up on the sofa with the sickly dog. Even if her mother-in-law didn’t remember, why had she pressed the point, and—to be honest—been a little snippy? Was this punishment for holding up lunch?

  However, if Gayle was annoyed, she showed none of it as she recounted an incident from when Spencer had still been in primary school. In fact, her usually prickly demeanor melted away and she laughed and gesticulated as she told how Spencer had hidden behind the sofa so he could stay up to ring in the New Year with the family. They’d found him asleep there in the morning, after a great deal of panic about his empty bed. This memory was safe territory for Gayle. No danger of anyone not born a Barry accidentally trespassing in it.