The Last Goodbye

by Fiona Lucas

  Teresa lifted the dozy baby so his chin was resting on her shoulder, then she rubbed him firmly on his back. After a few moments, he let out a gurgling belch. “I wonder what this little man will be like. Whether he’ll be like me or like Scott? Or just a mixture of all of us in his heritage, combined to a secret recipe that is uniquely him.” She looked down at her son with such love that tears almost sprang to Anna’s eyes. “It’s all in there,” Teresa added. “All those things have already been planted, but it’s going to take years to see them come to fruition, for them to work their way out.”

  That was a beautiful thing, Anna decided, to watch a person unfold like that.

  Teresa caught Anna’s eye. There was a huskiness in her tone when she said, “A lot of the time I find myself hoping that he’s just like his uncle.”

  Anna didn’t say anything. She just gave a watery smile to her sister-in-law, and then she went across the room to give her a hug. Just in case the moment was getting too girly and emotional, little Spencer responded by doing the manliest thing he could think of and let out a giant fart. Anna caught Teresa’s eye and they both burst out laughing.

  Teresa lifted him and undid a couple of snaps so she could peek inside his onesie to see what the damage was. “Oh, crap,” she said. “Literally. It’s exploded right out of the diaper, and it’s probably gone halfway up his back.” She pulled a face. I haven’t got used to that bit yet,” she said, standing up and giving her son a disgusted look. “I’d better change him. Third time today, and it’s not even noon yet!”

  Just as Anna had sat back down again, the doorbell rang. “Get that, would you, please?” Teresa said as she headed up the stairs. “It might be another flower delivery.”

  But when Anna opened the door, instead of finding a bouquet, she came face-to-face with her mother-in-law. “Oh! It’s you,” Gayle said, echoing perfectly what Anna was thinking. “Where’s Teresa? Where’s the baby?”

  And hello to you too, Anna thought, as Gayle hurried past her, but she held her tongue, reminding herself of what Teresa had just said. Maybe, if she squinted and tipped her head in the right way, she would be able to see that little speck of Spencer in Gayle. It might prevent Anna from throttling her.

  Richard trailed in behind, as always, laden with bags. He gave Anna a one-armed hug, careful not to bash her with what was obviously a prize haul from John Lewis’s baby department. “I think what you meant to say, my darling,” he called after his wife, “is, ‘Anna! What a marvelous surprise!’”

  “Oh, yes. Of course,” Gayle said absentmindedly as she made her way into the living room. Richard and Anna followed.

  “I dropped in for a visit,” Anna explained. “Teresa’s just gone to change his diaper.”

  As if on cue, her sister-in-law came back down the stairs. “All nice and fresh for Grandma,” she said, and handed the baby over to Gayle, who had spun around and stretched out her arms as soon as she’d heard Teresa’s voice.

  Gayle’s face lit up as she cradled her grandson in the crook of her arm. “He’s grown so much!” she said, turning to exclaim to Richard.

  “We only saw him yesterday. How on earth can you tell if he’s grown at all?”

  But his wife had already focused her attention back to the baby in her arms. She walked into the living room and sat down in the corner of the sofa. “He looks so much like Spencer,” she said, almost whispering.

  Richard gave one of his weary, well-worn huffs that seemed to be his main method of dealing with his wife when she was being a little exasperating. “That’s because he is Spencer.”

  “No,” Gayle said, tickling the baby under his chin so he opened his mouth and his eyes wide, “I meant my Spencer.”

  Richard shot a look at Anna. “Don’t you mean ‘our Spencer’?”

  Then Gayle did the most bizarre thing. She took her eyes off the baby for a few seconds and giggled. Actually giggled. “Oh, silly me. Of course I meant our Spencer.” She smiled at her husband, not minding his dig at all, and then things went even further into strange territory, because she turned that smile on Anna, clearly including her in the joke. “But he does look like him, don’t you think?”

  There was such hope in her eyes that Anna dutifully walked across the room and inspected her nephew yet again. She supposed he looked as much like Spencer as any baby could. He had the blond hair (albeit the merest hint of peach fuzz), the blue eyes, and he certainly knew how to make himself heard and command the attention in any room he was in. “I suppose he does.”

  Gayle smiled again. Anna was starting to think that the baby was a magical being, a changeling. His presence seemed to have wrought an amazing transformation on his grandmother. Anna smiled back at Gayle and it felt good. Hopeful.

  She couldn’t wait to tell Brody. Gabi was very loyal, but Gayle had now become enemy number one in Gabi’s eyes since the vol-au-vents incident. It would take a while for her to warm up to the idea that reestablishing a closer relationship with Gayle could be a good thing.

  But Brody . . . Brody would see it straightaway. He would celebrate quietly with her. Quietly, because she couldn’t imagine him doing anything noisily or hastily. He always seemed so self-contained, so steady.

  Not for the first time recently she wondered who he was when he wasn’t her shoulder to cry on, what he did for a job, for example. She knew he liked the outdoors and lived in a remote area, so maybe he did something like farming or forestry?

  Anna watched while Gayle alternately fussed over little Spencer and instructed Teresa on the finer points of using both the top-of-the-line breast pump and the video baby monitor she’d brought with her, but after a while Anna checked her watch. “I’m going to head off,” she said. She’d been here a couple of hours and it was probably time to reduce the crowd Teresa had to deal with.

  “Well, it’s been lovely to see you,” Richard said. Gayle even looked up from fussing over Spencer and agreed, smiling. Wonders would never cease.

  Teresa showed Anna to the door and they hugged. “Don’t be a stranger,” Teresa said as they pulled away from each other

  “I won’t.”

  “I’ve always felt that, in family terms, our husbands were the main events in the Barry family,” Teresa added. “So we ‘also-rans’ have to stick together.” She gave Anna another squeeze. And as Anna started to head toward her car, she called out, “See you next Sunday?”

  Anna stopped and turned, frowning.

  Teresa elaborated. “Lunch at Gayle and Richard’s.”

  “Didn’t we say we were only doing lunch once a month from now on? And the next one isn’t until the day before Spencer’s birthday. That’s weeks away.”

  Teresa looked uncomfortable. “Well, yes . . . But I thought we’d kind of reverted to the old pattern anyway.” Anna’s frown deepened, and taking it in, Teresa carried on talking. “I mean, I just assumed you couldn’t make it the time before last.”

  “The time before last?” Anna asked, her voice thin.

  Teresa looked sheepish. She glanced back toward the living room, where they could hear Gayle’s over-loud baby talk continuing. “We went over for lunch on the third.”

  Anna went cold. “Are you telling me that family lunches have been continuing every fortnight without me?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know . . . It was just that one time. Maybe Gayle invited us because she was taking pity on me, because I was heavily pregnant, and she was saving me from cooking?”

  “But didn’t you say you’re going next week too?”

  Teresa sighed. “Well, you know she wants as much ‘baby time’ as possible.” She looked down for a moment, studying the paving stones of her driveway, before meeting Anna’s gaze again. “I don’t think this has been engineered, Anna, honestly I don’t.”

  Anna nodded and smiled, but her jaw felt tight and she knew the warmth hadn’t reached her eyes. She turned and walked toward the street, where her car was parked.

  WHEN BRODY STARED at the notebook on his
desk early on Sunday morning, everything inside him said, Run! He wanted to shoot out the back door of his cottage, across the yard and into the safety of his workshop. He wanted to feel a chisel in his hand, lose himself in the mindless shaping of wood.

  But Brody didn’t run. Instead, he pulled out his desk chair and sat down. He sat there for a minute or so and then, when he was ready, he opened the notebook lying on the desk, picked up his fountain pen and pressed the nib against the page.

  Write, he told himself. Write something. Write anything!

  The nib began to move. A word began to form.

  Pain.

  Brody wasn’t sure where it had come from, but it had come. Not a word he wanted to read, particularly. Not a word he really wanted to think about. But it was a word, so both triumph and discomfort swirled within him. He made the pen move again.

  Grief . . . Guilt . . . RAGE.

  Brody stared at what he’d just written. He did feel angry, he realized, but he didn’t know who with. He tried again.

  I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .

  The heart-thumping feeling became even more dramatic. Was he getting enough oxygen? He wasn’t sure he was getting enough oxygen. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Come on,” he said out loud. “Enough of this. Write a bloody sentence!”

  He began to write again. Or, at least, that was what he’d intended to do, but it seemed his subconscious had other plans. His pen began to sketch a man. He was standing alone, and as Brody let his imagination take over, the landscape around him began to form. There were mountains behind him, stark and jagged, and at his feet was the edge of a gaping chasm. The man was looking into the gash in the earth, Brody realized. He’d been looking into it for so long he’d forgotten he could do anything else.

  The anger in Brody’s chest began to swell and his pen moved faster and faster, filling in the outlines, bringing shadows and darkness to the scene. He kept going until the fire inside him dwindled and when he looked again, he discovered the man had gone.

  Logic told him that he was still there on the page, that he’d just covered the figure in dark ink during his shading frenzy, but in his mind he knew differently. He knew exactly where the man was.

  The man was at the bottom of the chasm.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The sun beat down on Anna’s shoulders as she slid a small case into the trunk of her car, smiling to herself. Tomorrow would have been Spencer’s thirty-fifth birthday, and this evening she’d be installed in a bungalow in Camber Sands for two whole nights. Their bungalow. She was almost disappointed it had been renovated by the new owners. The details on the website she’d booked through cited features like a tumble dryer, Wi-Fi and a log burner. She doubted that this time the electricity would cut out or that the plumbing would creak. Still, it would be a chance to remember Spencer in her own way, free from any interference, and it looked like the weather was going to be glorious. She couldn’t have planned it better.

  Just one more hurdle to get through before that was possible: the special Barry Sunday lunch Gayle had planned. Anna was still reeling from the news that Teresa and Scott had been going to lunch with her in-laws fortnightly, as if nothing had changed, but she wasn’t going to think about that today. She wasn’t even going to mention it, because she was dreaming of warm night breezes, cool water lapping at her bare toes and silky sand rumpled and creased by an outgoing tide.

  One lunch was all she had to get through and at least it was at the Cinnamon Café instead of at Gayle and Richard’s. This is just the prologue, she told herself as she pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot and found a space next to Scott and Teresa’s car. The main event is later. Let everything slide off you for the next hour or two, the way Teresa does, and then you’ll be on your way.

  To be honest, the change of location was a breath of fresh air. Anna hadn’t realized how stale they’d all been getting at Gayle and Richard’s Sunday after Sunday, how stuck in a rut they’d become. When she greeted her in-laws, they were led to a circular table—no possibility of them taking their usual seats—and the excellent, innovative Indian cuisine they ordered seemed to put them all into a good mood, even Gayle, and if that hadn’t done the trick, she could always have cooed over her new grandson, who was sleeping soundly in his pram next to the table.

  When coffee was served, Anna began counting the seconds until she could walk out of the restaurant door. All she could think about was the overnight case sitting inside the trunk of her car, which was probably why she missed Gayle putting a large gold-embossed folder on the table, until she coughed to get everyone’s attention.

  “I decided to get a little gift for you all to mark what would have been Spencer’s birthday, something special.” Gayle patted the folder, then opened it and passed large cards to both Scott and Anna. Anna recognized the thick white card and gold scrolling as the sort of thing professional photographers used for protecting prints and enlargements. Had Gayle got them all a photo of Spencer? Goodness. That was actually very thoughtful of her. “Thank you so much,” she said with real warmth as she opened the card to reveal the picture. She could take this with her to Camber Sands this afternoon and stand it on the mantelpiece.

  Gayle seemed very pleased with the praise and puffed up a little. “The man I got to do it even used his computer to do some tidying up. It was so clever! Richard and I have had one blown up to go in the living room, with a lovely frame.”

  Anna looked down at her gift and felt stupidly proud when she realized Gayle had chosen a solo shot of Spencer from their wedding album. However, as she continued to study the picture on the table in front of her, a cold feeling crept into her stomach. She knew every photograph in her wedding album intimately, so of course she recognized this particular shot. But there was something different, something off.

  Little Spencer started to stir, and Teresa stood and picked him up, rocking him, while she and Gayle began a discussion about whether the two brothers had looked more like each other when they were younger or as they’d grown older. Anna cocked her head to one side, squinting slightly. What was it that wasn’t quite right . . . ? Was there something missing? It was like trying to thread a needle without her reading glasses on.

  And then it hit her.

  It was her.

  She was the thing that was missing from the photograph.

  She jumped to her feet, spilling milky coffee not only all down her cream blouse but also over her dead husband’s smiling face.

  This hadn’t been a solo portrait of Spencer on their wedding day, one taken with his best man before the service. It had been one of her and Spencer together after the ceremony. Look, there was the proof: a couple of pastel flakes of confetti still resting on his shoulder.

  “Tidying up,” Gayle had said. Photoshopping is what she’d meant.

  She’d had Anna airbrushed out of the picture.

  ANNA SLAMMED HER front door behind her and marched up the stairs. She wasn’t heading to Camber Sands. Not yet, anyway. There were a couple of things she needed to do first after that horrendous bloody lunch.

  She walked into her bedroom, stripped off her coffee-stained blouse and threw it on the floor then went to the wardrobe. Not hers but Spencer’s. She opened the door and slid the first shirt her fingers found off its hanger. It was the one she’d bought him a few summers ago, white collarless linen. She pulled it on over her bra, then turned and headed back downstairs.

  This was all Gayle’s fault! That woman had spoiled everything. Yet again.

  And there was no way Anna was going to another Sunday lunch, not in the history of this universe. Which was just as well, seeing as she probably wasn’t welcome at Gayle and Richard’s anymore, anyway.

  She was about to head out back to her car, where her suitcase waited for her, but as she strode across the hall, she turned on her heel and changed direction, making a beeline for the kitchen. She opened the freezer and crouched down so she could pull out the bottom drawer,
where all the items past their best-before dates and crusty with frost ended up. Her fingers closed around a medium-sized Tupperware box and she pulled it out. The contents rustled and rattled slightly. The sound both infuriated and thrilled her.

  She stood up and looked around. No, this wasn’t the right place.

  Taking the box, she left the kitchen and headed across the hallway into her open-plan living and dining room. She walked to the bay window that overlooked the street, then turned her back to it. From here, there was a good long stretch of space all the way to the French windows that led out onto the garden. Perfect.

  She peeled back the lid of the box, reached inside and lifted out one of the dozen vol-au-vents inside. It started to crumble immediately. Even though the cold burned her fingertips, she held it for a few moments, focusing intently on a spot at the other end of the room, before lifting her arm and hurling it with all her might.

  For a few heart-stopping seconds it flew through the air and then—bam!—it hit the window, and the frozen flaky pastry exploded, shattering into what seemed like a million tiny pieces. Anna almost let out a gurgle of joyous laughter, then she picked up another vol-au-vent and threw it after the first.

  This one didn’t disintegrate quite so dramatically, but it felt just as satisfying, especially the dull thud as the frozen filling hit the floor. That was it. She couldn’t stop after that. She had to keep going and going until the box was empty and the far end of the living room looked as if there’d been a massacre at a 1970s dinner party.

  Anna dropped the empty plastic box and let it fall to the floor. She didn’t even think about getting the Hoover or a dustpan and brush as she smiled and turned to head outside. She got in her car, backed carefully out of her driveway, then pointed her car in the direction of Camber Sands and put her foot on the gas.