The Book of Second Chances

by Katherine Slee

Emily shook her head to both. She looked over to see the crossword Giancarlo had been attempting was from The Sunday Times.

  Giancarlo saw her looking. “Gigi introduced me to it and, I understand, she got the tradition from Catriona. A way to help improve her English, but I think just a way to link them together even when they were oceans apart.”

  “We always did it too.” Sometimes it took them all week to finish. Her grandmother would burst in from the garden to announce that the answer to five down was “tyranny,” or Emily would wake in the night to realize that the alternative word for “genie” was “jinn.”

  Another tradition. Another secret that united friends across time and even death. An idea passed along from one to another. Just like Tyler. Emily fingered the earrings he had gifted her, trying not to think about the way the very nearness of him always left her feeling more alive, more invested in the day.

  “I wish I could talk to her.” Sometimes Emily would get to the end of the day and realize she had nothing to talk about, and no one to talk to.

  “You should still talk to her.” Giancarlo dropped two lumps of sugar into his coffee, stirred through the liquid with a teaspoon. “It helps, weirdly, to tell them about your day. That’s why I still do the crossword. It makes me ask her what the answer should be, and I try to imagine what she would say.” He gave a small chuckle, a longer sigh as he thought of his wife. “Even if she didn’t know, she would come up with some crazy idea, make me laugh, make me remember once again how very much I loved her.”

  At home, Emily would communicate through email, or say a few passing words to the people she came across during everyday life, but it had only ever been with Catriona that she had formed a real conversation. Or Milton, but that was always decidedly one-sided. The very fact she couldn’t ever talk to her grandmother again had fallen, like a stone, inside her soul and was refusing to budge, no matter how many times she reminded herself she had known it was coming. Her death wasn’t a surprise, although it was still a shock whenever she went to make a cup of tea and automatically took down two cups.

  “It’s too hard,” she said, picking up her silver teaspoon and twirling it between her fingers.

  “We are all dying, Emily. It’s how we choose to live that we can control, nothing else.”

  “Don’t you miss her?”

  Giancarlo sighed as he took hold of her hand, patted it gently. “Every day. But Gigi lived life to its fullest. She ate everything, drank everything, danced in a thunderstorm and chose not to regret a thing, because it was a complete waste of time to look back.”

  “Sounds like something Grandma would say.”

  “I didn’t have to watch her suffer, like you did. It was the most horrific experience of my life, but she went without pain.”

  “I wanted her to fight.”

  “Catriona was powerful, she had such strength, even in the darkest of times.” He looked at her then, opened his mouth, closed it, almost as if he weren’t sure if he should say what he was about to. “She read a poem at Gigi’s funeral. I hated her for it at the time, but now I understand what it was she was trying to make me, make us all, understand.”

  Emily clenched her jaw, ignoring the spasm down one side of her neck and how her hands balled into fists as he began to speak, taking care over each syllable. “A total stranger one black day…”

  Stop. Please stop, she thought as she realized that Giancarlo was reciting a poem by e. e. cummings. The words pushed inside her mind, swirled all around, pulling up all sorts of memories and emotions she wanted to ignore.

  “Giancarlo, please.”

  He was crying as he took hold of her hands and slowly eased them open, but the words kept coming.

  “I can’t,” she gasped between breaths, aware of the tears that were falling from her own eyes, because she knew the poem. Her grandmother had made her read it, dissect it, along with countless others about death, about sorrow. So many lessons her grandmother had tried to teach her, things she had steadfastly refused to hear.

  “Can’t what?”

  “Forgive myself for surviving.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he said.

  “What would you know?”

  He didn’t reply, he simply sat quite still, looking at her.

  The same waitress came back, carrying a parcel that she laid on the table between them. Giancarlo nodded at Emily, but she didn’t want it, nor what was hidden inside. That damn feeling had returned, the one that had been lurking in her subconscious, only dealt with momentarily by the priest, but now it was back and ready to be set free.

  “Can you do it, please,” she whispered, watching as he pulled the paper apart to reveal a picture of two girls holding tight to the back of an enormous bird with feathers the color of fire. They were soaring over the earth, high into the heavens, looking down on a village through the center of which a river ran.

  Emily let go her relief as she reached across for the book, because it was a story about love. About a girl who carried a bird with damaged wings through a thunderstorm, only for it to die. So she buried it under her window, and the next morning a phoenix rose from the ground to take her and Ophelia flying through the clouds to visit a rainforest, where a whole host of creatures was nesting in the tallest of trees. Ophelia had asked what happened if they fell, only for the phoenix to reply that they simply had to learn to fly.

  Giancarlo sipped his coffee, put the cup gently on the table, and Emily noticed that his hand was shaking. She could feel that doubt, that fear, slink back inside her heart as she pulled out a plain white envelope from between the pages of the book.

  “There’s something about death that makes you appreciate how fleeting, how precious, life really is,” he said, looking at the envelope as if he might have some idea what it contained. “After the initial pain and horror fades a little, then you realize how fragile we all are. How easily all of this—this life—can be gone.” He paused to wipe his spectacles with a handkerchief. “She wanted you to understand that you were her reason for not giving up.”

  Emily thought again about the story within the book Giancarlo had given her and when it had been written, shortly after their return from London. They had gone for a book signing at Hatchards, with all those people staring at her, followed by the disastrous visit to the cemetery, when Emily hadn’t even been able to look upon her parents’ grave. Back in Norfolk, she had locked herself in her room and refused to come down, to engage in anything that remotely resembled conversation.

  Catriona had tried everything: pleading, cajoling, not to mention bribery, but not even the sight of Milton at her window had been enough to pull Emily out of her nightmares. For close to a week she had done nothing but cover her thoughts with music turned up to full volume, Jimi Hendrix and his guitar pushing everything else from her mind.

  It wasn’t until her grandmother had slipped a few sheets of paper under her door, pages filled with the beginnings of a new story, that Emily had found a way to rid herself of the darkness. Only then had she been able to open the window wide, let in the light and begin again.

  This is different, Emily thought as she stared down at the book’s cover. She understood the message her grandmother was trying to send; knew what it was she was expected to do. But knowing and succeeding were two very different things.

  “I don’t know how to start again.”

  “Then you have to try.” Giancarlo opened the book, pointed to the dedication on the first page.

  For Noah—I should have said yes.

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “There is one more thing.” Giancarlo rose from his chair, reaching around the side to take hold of a wooden cane with a silver parrot on its end. He held out one arm and Emily took it, escorting him back inside the restaurant and to a small windowless room which served as an office. The walls were filled with black-and-white photographs, all hung in haphazard fashion, all of people she did not know.

  Apart from one.

  Emily
’s eye fell on a photograph of Catriona and Gigi, both in bikinis, with hair soaked through with water from the sea. They were having a tug of war with a towel, Gigi bent double with laughter and Catriona leaning back, as if she were about to fall.

  “I was angry for such a long time.” Giancarlo gazed at the photograph as he went around the desk. “Angry at God, at myself, for wondering whether knowing Gigi for only a moment was better or worse than never knowing her at all.” He opened a drawer and took out another book, slid it across to Emily with a tear in his eye.

  It was a copy of Ulysses. The same book her grandmother had seen a stranger read on a train headed for London and, years later, asked Emily to hide in the story Giancarlo had just given her.

  “She said you would understand.”

  “I don’t.” She flicked through the pages but found nothing out of the ordinary. The book was a puzzle within a puzzle. A parody, a story set over the course of one day. Where was the link she was being asked to find?

  “You will.” Giancarlo put the book back in his desk drawer. “But don’t be alone when you try to figure it out.”

  “Why not?” Emily swallowed away the lump that had reappeared in her throat as she remembered the way he had looked at the envelope tucked inside her grandmother’s book.

  “You have someone with you?” He was staring at her again, and she could see a certain sadness behind the lenses of his spectacles. It made her understand that every time he thought of Catriona, he remembered too the wife he had lost.

  “I do,” she replied, thinking of Tyler and Phoebe, not certain they were with her in the way Giancarlo, or her grandmother, hoped.

  “Just remember,” he said with a kiss on each cheek, then one more for luck. “If you block out everything, you end up with nothing.”

  It felt as if Emily’s feet were moving, but she had no idea whether or not she wanted to go where they were taking her. She began to hum the tune to a long-forgotten hymn as she walked away from the river, away from the man who taught her grandmother how to toss a circle of dough into the sky. One more step toward the unknown. Like a lab rat in a maze from which there was no escape.

  Don’t panic, she told herself as she came into a square alive with noise and smell and people. Everywhere there were people, on all sides, like walls closing her in. She longed for the stretch of shoreline she could find so close to home. Part of her ached for the sight of the ocean that continued over and beyond the horizon and the endless curve of sky that she liked to watch the passage of time play out on. The rising sun, the dance of cloud, the myriad of stars that spoke to her of people from long ago, who had stared up at a light so far away, that guided them as they explored an unknown world.

  Where was her constant, her Northern Star, keeping her safe from harm?

  Emily sat on the pavement outside a café and checked her watch, spotting a couple as she searched through the chaos. Tyler was taking pictures of people on his phone and scribbling in his notebook. Phoebe was seated next to him, eating ice cream and reading something Emily could not see. Three suitcases were lined up next to the table, all ready to go.

  Not exactly what Giancarlo meant, but they were all she had and, right now, she had no desire to carry on alone. Right now, she needed someone to tell her it was going to be okay.

  Tyler looked up as Emily approached, saw the anxiety written all over her face. “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied, turning the envelope over in her hand, wishing she could peep inside, just for a second, to decide whether or not the words it contained would do more harm than good.

  “Have you read it?” He was staring at her. Everyone was always staring at her.

  “No.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a sudden cheer, and Emily looked across to see a woman throw her arms around a man, who then picked her up and turned full circle. As he did so, something caught the sun, flicked a patch of light onto Emily’s face and she turned her head away. She had no desire to look upon their happiness when she could sense something else, waiting. With a deep breath, she slipped her finger under the envelope’s seal and pulled out the pages of palest blue.

  28 July 2003

  “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

  JRR Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

  My child died and I wasn’t there to say goodbye. To tell her how much I adored her. How she changed my life the very moment I first saw her pink, crumpled face. No, before that. When I decided to keep her, happy accident that she was.

  And now she is gone and everything is dark and filled with shadows of what was, what should have been. Shadows of the future that I catch glimpses of whenever I hear someone singing. She had the most beautiful voice and I miss it so.

  Adrianna had to identify the body because I was too far away to get back in time. It haunts me, that image I will never see. Of two women separated by the split second that turns life into death, one carrying that moment around with them forever. Never being able to unsee the cold, brutalized body of her best friend. It should have been my duty, my burden, but I am also so selfishly grateful I didn’t have to see her that way. That I at least get to think of her alive and full of joy.

  Hospitals are hateful places. Not least the stench of antiseptic and death, but the strange stillness that seems to cloak everything. No one talks at a normal volume. It’s all hushed conversations in the corners of rooms. Making up sentences that contain a multitude of sins—false hope, lies, counter-lies and bucketloads of positivity thrown in for good measure.

  But I have to be here, for her, for Emily. Her body is being held together by so many different materials, I’m not sure I can remember them all. All of her injuries. All of her broken bones and torn muscles and skin that the doctors have stitched back together like she’s a patchwork doll. Her beautiful face. Her innocence. Shattered the very moment a stranger took the turn too fast.

  She keeps pointing to the window. She likes to watch the birds even though it makes her cry. I’m terrified of what will happen next, because she hasn’t said a word in over two weeks and part of me thinks she never will. Not because she can’t, but because she has nothing left to say. What are words other than an expression of feeling, and how are you supposed to convey those feelings when they are raging inside of you, shredding your heart and burning your soul?

  Too many people. We are surrounded by too many well-wishing people, who want to help, want to touch, want to comfort, but none of them know how. None of them will ever be able to fill the bottomless pit of despair that Emily and I are now trapped within.

  I must take her away. Far from all the reminders of home. All the people and places she knows. Give her a chance, a fighting chance, to recover. Give me a chance to figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do now.

  I am left behind. Empty and bereft, with no desire to carry on. But I must, and I will. Because she has lost her entire world too and I swear to do all that I can to try and piece it back together somehow. I will love her with all my heart and show her that, despite all the sadness, we can always rely on one another to search out the light, the song, the laughter.

  CMR

  19

  ROBIN

  Erithacus rubecula

  “She was singing to me.” Emily gasped.

  “What? Who?”

  A web of tangled memories with the merest suggestion of something more. Something that was asking Emily to draw back the shutter she had put over the past and force herself to remember.

  “She was singing to me. Then all of a sudden she stopped.”

  “Emily?” Tyler was looking at her, waiting for her to say something more.

  Time suddenly slowed, revealing gaps and cracks she had never dared to look through before, and then the memories began anew, swirling through one another, a series of images on a loop she could not escape from.

  Images from the day
she had no desire to see.

  “Make it stop,” she gasped, clutching at her heart, the words coming out between labored breaths. “Make the pain stop.” She fell against the table, sent glasses and cutlery scattering to the ground, sank into a chair and looked out at a world she was unable to see, to focus on.

  “She’s having a panic attack.” Tyler glanced at Phoebe.

  No, this is worse, Emily thought to herself. Like a long, sharp needle pressing against her heart, bringing new stabs of pain each time she tried to breathe.

  “Put your head between your legs.” Phoebe placed a hand at the back of Emily’s head, but she pushed her away.

  “Get off me,” she cried, and her grandmother’s pages tumbled to the floor. Phoebe picked them up, took a few steps away.

  “Emily, what’s wrong?” Tyler bent down to her height, tried to make her look at him. “What was in her diary?”

  Her body and mind were at a loss for any kind of reaction. It made her feel like she was back in that hospital bed, seeing the world through an unwanted but familiar lens.

  All was changed, and she could never go back to how it was before. Just like then. Just as when she woke up to a room silent apart from the sound of her grandmother breathing. She was slumped in a wing-backed armchair, over by the window through which Emily could see the sun rising over the rooftops of London.

  There were people, words, tastes. A biscuit on a plate that crumbled like ash and she hadn’t been able to eat because her jaw was wired shut. But she could remember.

  She had never wanted to remember.

  The low note of pain that had escaped her chapped lips, woken her grandmother from a restless sleep, who then came over and tried to give comfort when she had no idea how.

  “I don’t want to remember,” Emily screwed her eyes tight, tried to shut out the past.

  “Remember what?” Tyler was there, close enough that she could smell the coffee and tobacco on his breath.