by Fiona Lucas
“Maybe you need to back off a little? Give him space?”
“Why do you say that?”
Gabi sighed heavily. “Voice of experience.”
Anna waited for Gabi to explain, but Gabi let her body drop back down on the bed and went back to studying the ceiling light. “A coat hanger is sticking into my butt,” Gabi mumbled, “but I can’t be bothered to move.”
Anna poked Gabi again. It was quickly becoming her favorite new method of communication. “What do you mean ‘voice of experience’?”
“A little because I see that I was pushy with you sometimes . . .”
Anna squeezed her hand.
“And a little because . . .” Gabi scrunched up her face before she carried on. “Because I phoned Lee.”
Anna sprang up to a sitting position and stared at her friend. “You phoned Lee?”
Gabi drew a deep breath and opened her eyes again. She nodded. “I was feeling so low. He didn’t answer and then . . .” She looked away, color rising in her cheeks. “I did it again.”
Anna blinked, too stunned to say anything.
“But I think he changed his number . . . because the next time it was just dead.” Gabi’s lip wobbled. “I just miss him so much, Anna. I didn’t want—” The rest of the sentence was lost as she covered her face with her hands and sobbed.
Anna scooted over and put her arms around Gabi. “I know,” she said soothingly as she stroked her friend’s hair. “I know . . .”
Gabi cried for a while, then composed herself, wiping her tears away with the heels of her hands. Anna passed her a box of tissues, and when Gabi had produced an elephant-worthy blow, she turned to face Anna.
“Do you think he changed his number because of you?” Anna asked.
Gabi shrugged. “He kept saying he wanted to upgrade—his contract was going to be up soon. Maybe he just got a new phone and got a new number? Or maybe he just didn’t want to . . .” She swallowed. “. . . want to speak to me anymore.”
Anna put an arm round Gabi and pulled her close. “Who cares why he did it? You don’t need him. You deserve better than what he gave you.”
“I know . . . I don’t want Lee, really. Just being close to someone, not feeling so . . .” Gabi sobbed again.
“So alone?”
Gabi nodded as she wiped her nose yet again.
“I get that.”
Gabi reached out and stroked her arm. “You more than anyone else. And I understand in my head I should move on, but my heart feels joined to him, whether I want it or not.”
“Like me, you’re just not in that place yet. And that’s okay. Give yourself some time and space to process it all.”
“Like you have.”
Anna let out a dry laugh. “Like I’m trying to do.”
“You have changed this year,” Gabi said, nodding. “You don’t see it, but I do. That’s why you must give Brody time and space. You just said we can’t push these things.”
Anna rolled onto her side to face Gabi. “I didn’t think I wasn’t giving him that. I thought I was being a concerned friend.” She pulled a tissue out the box in Gabi’s hands and used one, suddenly finding herself teary too. “I care about him, Gabs. And I know you think that’s ridiculous, seeing as I’ve never met the man.”
“I don’t think it’s ridiculous.”
Anna turned to look at Gabi. This was new . . .
“If you find someone who makes you feel better, even for a minute, then that’s special.” Gabi gave a hiccupy laugh. “Would you give me his number? I could do with some manly TLC.”
Anna laughed as she was supposed to, but it surprised her how territorial she suddenly felt about Brody. “You think I should stop trying to contact him?” she asked quietly, neatly steering the conversation down another avenue.
Gabi nodded. “Yes, for a short time. See what happens.”
Anna sighed heavily. “And what if nothing happens?”
Gabi shrugged. “You can’t make people do what they don’t want to, or aren’t ready to do. I’ve learned this now.”
Anna shuffled toward Gabi and kissed her cheek. “I love you,” she said, smiling.
Gabi made a disbelieving face, but she smiled back. “It’s hard not to. Now . . .” she said, pushing herself up to a sitting position and surveying the tangle of shirts they were lying on. “What are we going to do about this mess?”
“I have a plan,” Anna said.
Gabi got to her feet and pulled Anna’s arm to help her sit up. “Which is?”
Anna looked around at the clothes strewn everywhere and the piles of black sacks around the room. “Like you said, this is a job one needs to be ‘present’ for. I vote we leave this for now and open a bottle of something cold, crisp and alcoholic.”
“Now that is a plan I can support,” Gabi replied.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Anna was waiting for the lift in the multistory parking lot. Now it was November, the shopping center was open until nine most nights for Christmas shopping. With her trip to Canada looming, Anna had decided to get a head start. While she was watching the numbers on the display above the lift door count down, her phone rang. She grabbed it out of her handbag but dropped it immediately when she saw the caller ID.
Oh, hell! It seemed to have gotten buried under everything else. She rummaged around in her bag, silently praying it wouldn’t go to voicemail before she could get to it. Finally, her stiff and uncooperative fingers grasped it. She pulled it up to her ear. “Brody?” she said breathlessly.
“Anna.” He sounded . . . different. Not good. “We need to talk.”
“I know,” she said, just as the lift pinged and the doors opened in front of her. She’d known they needed to talk for one week and six days now; she was just very glad that Gabi had been right and he’d come around to realizing that on his own.
She squeezed into the lift, which was already filled with people with bulky shopping bags. “Brody . . . Are you okay?”
The lift doors slid closed. Brody said something, but it sounded a bit like he was speaking underwater, and the signal kept cutting out. Damn lift! “I can’t hear you,” she tried to say clearly but without actually shouting, because it suddenly seemed as if all ears in the confined space were trained on her conversation.
His reply was just garbled rubbish.
“Don’t . . . Just don’t go anywhere. Okay?” she said more loudly, not caring now who was listening. Let them have their show. “I’ll call you back in a minute, I promise. Just please, please pick up when I do.”
She started dialing Brody’s number the moment the lift doors opened. Seconds later, she was striding across the parking lot, phone pressed to her ear as it continued to ring. What was taking him so long? He must have had the phone in his hand when he’d called her, and she’d hung up less than a minute ago.
It seemed to take an age, but finally she reached her car, unlocked it and slid into the driving seat. She slammed the door closed with her free hand, cutting off the noise of other vehicles and the whirring fans of the air-conditioning units of the shops below the parking lot.
She was staring ahead at a concrete post when he finally answered. “I’m going to tell you about a day in my life from just over nine years ago,” he began. “I know you’re going to have questions, Anna—you always do—but I’d really appreciate it if you just let me get through it before you ask anything.”
“Okay,” Anna replied quietly. She became aware of her pulse drumming rhythmically. This was serious. Really serious. Beyond the concrete pillar, the sky was dark and impenetrable.
Brody exhaled. “That day, I traveled with my ex-wife, Katri—she’s Finnish—to my parents’ house in the Lake District. They’d moved there about five years before. We were living in London at the time, in Richmond . . .”
Not a million miles from here, Anna thought. It was strange to think of Brody living less than twenty miles away at some point in the past, unreal almost.
“It was
a long drive, made worse by an accident on the M6, and it took us about seven hours to get there.” He paused for a moment, as if readying himself. “Our two-year-old daughter, Lena, was in the car with us.”
Brody had a daughter?
Anna’s mind reeled. How had she been talking to him all this time without knowing this? But she didn’t have time to ponder that question, because Brody carried on, his tone flat like a newsreader’s.
“Katri used to get migraines, and all that time stuck in traffic had set one off, so she went to have a lie down as soon as we arrived at my parents’ house. They lived in a tiny hamlet, not quite as remote as where I am now, but almost. They’ve sold the house since, but one of the reasons they bought it was that it had a beautiful garden enclosed with dry stone walls. At the back of the house there was a patio, and then a lawn that sloped gently down to a large pond, maybe thirty feet across. It was beautiful that day,” he added wistfully, “full of spring color.”
He painted the picture so skilfully that Anna could see it in her head: the climbing roses, the neatly clipped grass, the bright, fresh leaves on the trees.
“Mum put the kettle on, as she always did when we arrived, and she suggested that after being cooped up in the car we went and sat outside and got some fresh air. I took Lena out there, and I sat at one of the large benches that flanked the oak patio table. She started off on my lap, but it wasn’t long before she was wriggling. There was a ladybug on the back of the chair at the end of the table and she got up to investigate.” He paused for a moment. Anna could sense him revisiting that memory, letting it play in his head.
“She was fascinated. She put her face right up to it and watched it crawl around. Poor thing only just managed to fly away before she tried to pick it up. Once it was gone, she skipped around the table, singing to herself. She used to do that all the time, just making up the words as she went along. It was the most beautiful and honest creative expression I’d ever heard. And it made me think about Pip, the main character in my novels, and how she’d lost that same kind of innocence and joy, how she’d had to grow up fast and leave her childhood behind.
“I was about to start the last book in the series at that point, but I was stuck, struggling with her character development—what sort of person she’d end up being at the end of her journey. And listening to Lena sing about the ‘ladybud’ that had flown away, I knew that I couldn’t leave her so fiercely independent, almost adult in her thinking. I realized I had to return her to some of that joyful childishness she’d lost. She needed to be just a girl again. She needed to have fun.
“I was lost in thought, just staring out over the garden. I suddenly realized the singing had stopped. I couldn’t hear Lena anymore.”
Brody paused then, and Anna could hear him dragging in a few ragged breaths, but she kept her promise. She let him talk.
“I stood up and looked around, expecting to see her bending over a flower or grinning at me from under the table, but she was nowhere. I called her name, started to walk down the lawn, looking for a flash of her red T-shirt, which should have stood out wonderfully against all that green, but I couldn’t see anything but flowers and grass and shrubs.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “And the pond . . .”
Anna clamped her hand over her mouth. She wanted to drop the phone and run away but she made herself sit there. Brody needed her. He needed her to listen to this. Oh, Anna, be careful what you wish for . . .
Brody’s voice became even tighter. “The pond was covered in duckweed, exactly the same shade of green as the lawn, and to a two-year-old, it might have looked just like grass. I started running, and when I reached the edge of the pond, I could see a hole in the duckweed, ripples in the water . . .”
Anna began to cry. She made sure to do it silently so Brody wouldn’t hear her.
“I started grabbing at the water blindly, but the pond was probably three or four feet deep at the edge and got even deeper toward the middle. I couldn’t find her, Anna. I couldn’t find her, not quickly enough, anyway . . .”
Anna swallowed. She waited until she was sure that Brody had finished his story, or at least as much of it as he could say, before she asked a question. She knew she was probably asking the obvious, but she had to do it. After so many months of mystery, she needed to know for sure. “Did you get her out?”
He cleared his throat and waited a few seconds before carrying on. “Yes. Before the paramedics arrived—my mother had come out with the tea tray just as I pulled Lena out of the pond and laid her on the grass. She dropped the tray, teapot and all, and ran back inside the house to phone them. But it was at least a twenty-minute drive from the nearest town, and I could tell from the looks on their faces when they finally arrived that there was no hope. Even though I’d been doing my best with CPR.”
He broke off and all Anna could do was stare at the empty sky beyond the concrete posts of the parking lot. Her vocal cords were frozen shut. Brody had always had the right thing to say when she’d poured her soul out to him, and now she couldn’t even say a single word of comfort back to him. Some friend she was.
“Did you know that a child can drown in under a minute?” he asked, but Anna wouldn’t have replied if her voice had been working, because it almost seemed as if he was lost in his own words at this point, and he didn’t really need her answer. “And that after a certain point, even if they’re still alive, their body shuts down, making CPR much less likely to be effective?”
“Oh, Brody,” Anna said, her voice finally emerging scratchily from her throat. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“We were all numb with grief to start off with. You know what it’s like . . .”
Anna nodded, unable to talk without sobbing, so she held it in. Even though she knew Brody couldn’t hear her, she felt it important that she agreed, and she hoped he could feel it rather than hear it.
“But after a few months the numbness wore off and I got angry. I blamed my parents—for having the pond, for not having fenced it in to make it safe, even though I knew this was their first grandchild and it probably just hadn’t occurred to them. I said horrible things, Anna. I cut them off, refused to speak to them. And that was a despicable thing to do, to blame them, but I was being selfish and pigheaded. What else could I do? I had to blame someone. And I certainly hadn’t been able to face laying the blame where I should.”
“Brody . . .” Anna said, with a warning tone in her voice. She had a feeling she knew where this was going.
“It was my fault.”
There. He’d said it. Anna wished she could reach out and touch him.
“I shouldn’t have drifted off in my own imaginary world. I should have kept hold of her when she tried to wriggle away. I should have been faster . . . looked harder . . .”
“Oh, Brody,” Anna said again. “You know that’s not true, don’t you?”
“No,” he said baldly. “And I’m not the only one who thought so.”
“Did your wife blame you too? Is that why she left?”
“At first,” Brody said. “While I was still blaming my parents, but later she softened, said it was an accident. She wanted us to go through it together, share our grief, but I couldn’t do it. It was as if I had a wall around me. I couldn’t let her in. I couldn’t let anybody in. It was the only thing holding me together, you see, the only thing keeping me sane.”
“I know,” Anna said softly. She hadn’t had a wall, exactly, but she’d had her own coping mechanism, her numbness, her refusal to engage with the world. She sniffed, and then she sobbed. It had all built up, and now it was coming out noisily. So much for not letting on to Brody.
“Don’t cry for me, Anna,” he said with so much softness that it only made her cry harder. “I don’t deserve it.”
Anna grabbed a tissue from a packet in the center console of the car, blew her nose and composed herself. Alongside the aching sadness, his words prompted something hot and fiery inside her. Now she was angry with him too. “After Spencer died
, I kept questioning myself, moving all the variables around, as if his death was a game of chess I could win if I could only get the pieces in the right place.
“What if that driver hadn’t been drunk that evening? Or hadn’t drunk as much? What if I hadn’t wanted something from the corner shop, or if I hadn’t called Spencer back to ask him to get some milk too? He’d have left thirty seconds earlier. What if he’d crossed the road at a different point? In the end, I had come to one conclusion—this was a game I couldn’t win. It was always going to be checkmate because it was an accident—and so was what happened to Lena.”
He made a disbelieving noise, but Anna wasn’t letting him off with that.
“Like most accidents, there was a multitude of moving parts, just as there was with what happened to me. A handful of circumstances came together, stupid little things that if they’d happened on their own, would have meant nothing. But they did happen together, and it created a perfect storm, for want of a better term. Would you tell me that just because one of those variables was down to me that Spencer’s death was my fault?”
“Of course not!”
“Then why won’t you accept the same for yourself? If there hadn’t been traffic on the motorway, you wouldn’t have been as tired. If your wife hadn’t had a migraine, then both of you would have been outside with her. You see what I mean?”
“It’s not the same!”
Anna closed her eyes and screamed silently inside her head. Stubborn didn’t even begin to describe it. She wasn’t going to win this argument, not now, not today. “Okay . . . Even if it was your fault, even if maybe you could have stopped it happening, what does that mean? You have to punish yourself forever? What does that accomplish? How does that make anyone, even the people we’ve lost, any happier?” Her voice grew hoarse again. “How does it make them any more alive?”
Brody remained silent. It seemed she might have finally hit on a nerve.
“You’ve got to find a way to forgive yourself, Brody.”
There was a sarcastic edge to his voice when he replied, “You mean I’ve got to be kind to myself?”