The Book of Second Chances

by Katherine Slee

  “It says here that the house is mine.” Emily sank into a nearby armchair.

  “Yes.” Beth perched on the end of her desk, watching Emily closely.

  “It says that it’s always been mine.” Emily’s hands began to shake as she drank in the enormity of what she had just discovered. “That the estate, the rights, the books. It all belongs to me.”

  Emily felt light-headed, but wasn’t sure if it was due to shock, relief, or something more.

  “Who else was she going to give it to?”

  “It makes no sense.” Emily’s hands dropped to her lap. “Why bring me here, back to the beginning, like in one of her stupid books, only for it not to be finished?”

  “Maybe that’s the point.”

  “Why make me go through all of this,” she said, waving her arms out theatrically. “If the house belonged to me all along?”

  “Would you have left if she’d given you a choice?”

  Emily opened her mouth, then shut it again. In that moment she realized how, only a short while ago, she never would have believed it possible that she could be sitting here, having a conversation, an argument, with the woman who had inadvertently taught her how to hide behind her paintings. The woman who, though she helped put her back together, also made her shy away.

  Only a short while ago, Emily wouldn’t have been having a conversation with anyone other than the birds whom she fed the crumbs of her life to.

  Looking again at the Last Will and Testament of Catriona Robinson, she bit back the urge to rip it to pieces; swallowed down the distinct sense of anticlimax.

  “Come with me.” Beth held out her hand to Emily. “I want to show you something extraordinary.”

  Arm in arm they walked through the clinic, past the day room, past the library with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a squishy sofa by the window. A small group of children sat in a semicircle on the floor, listening to one of the nurses read aloud a story about a little girl and her duck.

  “The two of you really did create something rather magical.” Beth smiled as she continued to the end of the corridor, opened a door that never used to be there. “Those books have helped people in more ways than you could possibly know.”

  Together they stepped inside an enormous greenhouse, filled with exotic plants and the sound of running water. Emily felt damp on her skin, looked down to be surprised by the sight of a butterfly, opening and closing its wings on a nearby leaf. There was a mosaic path running through the center and out to the gardens, and Emily could see a couple of patients tending to a rhododendron bush in the far corner.

  “There’s also a new swimming pool, a Pilates studio, and we even have a couple of ponies, as well as all the chickens you used to chase.”

  “What’s this got to do with me?”

  Beth pointed to a sign above the door through which they had just come: “Built with the kind support of the Emily Davenport Foundation.”

  “It’s because of you. Because of the money Catriona donated from the sale of all those wonderful books. And not just us,” she continued, looping her arm through Emily’s and escorting her out to the gardens. “Charities the world over have benefited from her generosity. You have helped so many people put their lives back together, Emily. It really is quite remarkable what that little girl and her duck have achieved.”

  “She never told me,” Emily said in disbelief.

  “She never wanted you to feel obligated. She knew how much you loved to draw and didn’t want to take that joy away.”

  “She did it because of me.”

  “You gave her a sense of purpose. Something she never quite found with your mother; they were simply too different. You are so very much like Catriona. Your spirit, your determination, your creativity.”

  They walked on, and Emily breathed in, slow and deep, feeling a sense of calm begin to seep into her mind. She thought of all the things she now knew about Catriona Robinson. About the person, not just the grandmother. About who she was trying to get Emily to be.

  “I still don’t understand why she did it,” she said with a frown. “Why she gave it all up, her life, her friends, her freedom.”

  “Where are we?” Beth asked as they reached a simple wooden bench close to the shore of the lake.

  “Is that a rhetorical question?” Her tongue slipped through the words, almost stumbling, but Emily didn’t flinch, didn’t waver, because she no longer felt ashamed.

  “How did you get here?”

  “On a motorbike.”

  “Who brought you?”

  “Noah.”

  “And how did you find him?”

  How did she find him? How did she manage to find any of it? How did she manage to leave behind her familiar, stagnating life to set out on an adventure dreamt up by the mind of a dead woman?

  “Just sit here a moment.” Beth eased Emily onto the bench. “Sit here and think of her, of where she’s brought you. Where you’ve come from. Sit here and think of all the ways in which you are mad at her, all the ways you wish she was here, just so you could scream at her for dying. But allow yourself to remember, too, what it was she was trying to show you.”

  “So this is the end?”

  “Or the beginning, depending on how you look at it.” Beth handed her the envelope containing her grandmother’s final clue. “As a little girl I would rise early in the morning, listen for the gokotta. I liked to think they were singing just for me.”

  “The what?” Emily stared at what she held in her hands, not wanting to think about what she was supposed to do now.

  “Cuckoo. They used to live in the woods behind my home, back in Sweden. Do you remember?”

  “I remember.” A memory popped into her head, of making angels in the snow, then back to the house for a hot drink and to toast her toes by the open fire. A visit one winter, before relocating to Norfolk. Walks in the forest, listening to the call of birds, staring into the face of a deer that didn’t care how broken or disfigured she was. Water like ice that her grandmother dared to swim through. Her skin pink and bright, her smile wide and pure as she wrapped herself in layer after layer of blankets and shook droplets of cold onto Emily’s face.

  “You should go back,” Beth said. “Make some new memories.” A gentle pat on Emily’s shoulder and then Beth was gone, back toward the house, toward her patients. Because Emily didn’t belong here, not anymore. This place held nothing more than memories for her, which is why she couldn’t figure out what it was she was meant to have found by coming back.

  No more clues. No more signs or stops along the way. This was it, right here and now.

  The soft call of a nightingale singing in the trees, a rustle of leaves as an accompaniment. It seemed that birds would follow her wherever she went, or did she seek them out? Find comfort in their presence, their meanings? Did she always have such a fascination about them, or did that only come after the accident, when she looked for hidden meanings in anything and everything all at once?

  So much had happened. So many people and places forced upon her, but for what? Why make her come back to this place, with all its reminders of the long, slow recovery she had to endure? Why force her to go through it all if there was no manuscript to discover, if, in fact, there was never any need for her to leave home at all?

  Sheets of palest blue fluttered in the breeze, pages from her grandmother’s diary that were waiting to be read. Emily had been shown a piece of her grandmother’s life, several pieces that all slotted together but didn’t quite make the whole story. One summer that changed it all. One moment, one decision, one resounding “yes” to an idea, an adventure, presented to her via a book.

  Would Catriona have become a writer if it weren’t for what happened in Paris? Meeting Antoine and Gigi. And Noah. All of them. They all touched her, impacted her life, in some profound way. Charlie published her books. Beth put back together a broken, wounded child. Stories linked them all.

  Somewhere in each of her grandmother’s books there
was a message, a lesson, a hidden truth—something she had learnt along the way and wanted to impress upon her granddaughter, on all the children who read her stories. Each character, each place, took inspiration from her own life, her own highs and lows, because it’s not possible to appreciate the good without the bad. The light without the dark. The joy without the sorrow.

  “But most of all,” Emily whispered. “Most of all, we have to try.”

  Shoes off, Emily curled her toes into the grass; imagined them digging deeper, exploring the earth and all the creatures hidden below. She shuffled off the bench to lie on her back, felt the soft blades like a cushion beneath her, spread her arms wide and stared up at the great curve of blue. She breathed in the crispness of the air and watched the clouds that passed overhead, reaching out to one another, something joining to make something new.

  “Come on, Poppet.”

  A fragment of a memory from this exact spot. On a day so similar to today, when a girl and a woman sat by this lake, waiting for something to change.

  “Tell me what you see.”

  The girl turned her head away, closed her eyes as a solitary tear splashed to the ground. She began to pull at the blades of grass, ripping them from the soil and tossing them away. The woman sighed, a heavy slant of shoulder suggesting just how tired she was. For a while they sat like this, together but so very far apart. Then a duck appeared from the rushes by the lake, followed close behind by a line of ducklings. One by one they toppled into the water to swim after their mother, a dozen or so little webbed feet, working frantically under the surface in order to keep up, not wanting to be left behind.

  “Once upon a time…” The woman sat a little straighter, watched the ducks as they swam away. “Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Ophelia who had a pet duck named Terence.”

  The girl’s hand stilled. She gave a small sniff, then turned her face back toward her grandmother, a question forming in those hazel eyes.

  “What do you think she looked like?” Catriona Robinson asked her granddaughter, a picture already forming in the child’s mind.

  Emily sighed as she remembered thinking of how the girl would be short, but not too short. With hair tied up in pigtails and a green wooly hat. Terence wore Wellington boots, and a scarf when it was chilly, and they both loved hot chocolate with pink-and-white marshmallows floating on top, drunk in front of the fire while they sat, side by side, warming their feet.

  It all begins and ends here, she thought, picking up the last of the blue sheets of paper, the very last piece of the puzzle, the very last thing left behind for her to discover.

  12 August 2018

  I feel free in a way I haven’t for years. Taken back the control which cancer stole from me. The months of treatment, the sickness, the absolute exhaustion of it all. I was also so very aware of what it did to Emily. How it made her even more reclusive, even more reluctant to engage with the world.

  She is angry with me, at me, for giving up the fight. But this way I can simply be. Swim in the sea. Eat ice cream, drink champagne and actually live again.

  One day I hope she will understand, forgive me for dying in a way she never could forgive her parents. I know I never could forgive and forget the torturous hand of fate, but I have learnt, somehow, to accept it. To believe in a better tomorrow.

  I met a man this morning. His name is Richard and he has kind eyes and a great, big dog who licked my toes with glee. I’m wondering if he is to be my leaving present. The last person for me to love before I go. I want that for my darling Emily. For her to know the exquisite pain of loving someone and wishing only that they will love you in return.

  Often I lie awake at night, thinking of him, of Noah, and all that could have been. He was my first love. After him, no one ever came close. But perhaps I was partly to blame, because I was afraid of ever hurting that way again.

  I know now of all the different ways one person can love. I wonder whatever happened to Margot’s father? What would have happened if we had never met? Never shared the briefest moment that went on to create another life, another future. Oh, my beautiful girl, my baby, my beloved. I loved you so and have missed you every single day. I loved them all so very, very much and only wish that there was more time.

  I wish I could go back and do it all over again, to know that I didn’t need to compete with Margot over Emily. To know that I was allowed to simply be her grandmother, to show her a different side of life. To make her see that she had choices, could be whoever she wanted to be. To embrace the weird, the odd, the absolutely crazy side of her personality—the one that went to the park in a swimming costume, Wellington boots and superhero cape! To be the girl who wasn’t afraid to climb trees, swim in the ocean, challenge people and question it all.

  I loved Emily for her passion, her madness, her desire to always push for more, but I was so afraid of influencing her, of getting in between her and her mother. Which, of course, I now see was ridiculous. How could I be afraid of not being loved or not being wanted?

  I never really understood Margot, her decision to become completely reliant on a man. I thought it was weak, it was needy and made her too vulnerable. After everything I had battled with, alone. After all the lessons I’d tried to teach her, and she gave up her education, her career, her independence for him. I didn’t understand that she was making her decision based entirely on what was inside her own heart. I didn’t understand that she looked at the world with different eyes, with different dreams, than I did.

  I wish I hadn’t convinced myself that Margot didn’t need me, once she found Peter. Once she fell in love and gave up everything to be a wife and a mother. Because I understand now it’s what she wanted. She was not me, just as Emily is not me.

  The first time I saw them all together—Margot, Peter and Emily, just after she was born—it made me miss Noah, like a physical pain that would not leave me be. It made me miss what could have been and, of course, I couldn’t help but think about whether I should have said yes. He was the one person who knew me, the real me, and never tried to change it. He understood why I said no (three times, the poor man!), but he didn’t give up. He must have thought that one day I would give in to his relentless offerings of love, to finally realize that it was the right thing to do, that he would make me happy.

  I have made so many mistakes in my life. Agonized over too many decisions, and quite possibly this has done me more harm than good. Regret is nothing but a mess of emotion that we can do nothing about. Fear is altogether different. The fear I have always carried with me, of being left alone. After Gigi died it made me cling tighter to Margot. Made me rush back to Noah, only for me to leave him once again. It was unfair of me, but I didn’t know at the time how much more pain was still to come.

  After the accident, he came back into my life, for a while. We reconnected over my grief and I allowed him to take care of me, which is all I think he ever wanted to do. But it was a malevolent sense of déjà vu, seeing him interact with Emily, the same way he did with Margot. Perhaps I should have given him more of a chance, given us more of a chance, but once again I was so very acutely aware that any decision I made would affect a little girl, not just me.

  Did I suffocate Emily with love? Did I wrap her up so tight in that damn cotton wool that I forgot to teach her how to be independent? Probably shook it all out of her, tidied it away like all those memories in boxes, instead of reminding her who she used to be.

  I seem to be questioning everything now I know my time is coming to an end. The idea that there is nothing I can do to change what has happened is terrifying, but part of me is ready to go, to accept that this crazy mess called life is confused and muddled but also exhilarating and glorious, if only we are brave enough to grab hold of it and wring out every last drop of happiness while we still have the chance.

  I remember when she first began to draw again. How she needed it, we both needed it, as a way of communicating with one another. The stories I would tell made her disc
onnect from her pain, made her focus on what she could do, rather than what she couldn’t. I could see the pictures behind her eyes as she drew, couldn’t wait to see if what she produced made sense, matched, with what I imagined in my own mind.

  She is better than me. More talented, more creative, and I know that I encouraged her for selfish reasons as well as good. The books were just words on a page, it was her illustrations that really brought them to life, that fired up the imaginations of children the world over. That made Charlie see the potential of that very first story, written by the side of a lake in Switzerland, surrounded by the sound of nightingales. All I ever wanted was for Emily to be happy, to get better. I had no idea what would become of our creation, our distraction from reality. I had no idea how far that little girl and her duck would take us. How much it would act as a way to keep Emily hidden from the world, all over again.

  It was never my intention to use her talent for personal gain. It was circumstantial, but I do understand that it might have stopped her from being so much more. That by keeping her so close, I never let her learn how to fly. It is partly my fault, this cocoon, this life, she has stumbled into. At first it was necessary, the only way we could both bumble through our grief. But by allowing her to remain silent, even when the words began to take shape inside her mouth, did I only make it worse? By squirreling her away in the clinic, then in Norfolk, by allowing her to escape into made-up worlds, did I prevent her from being able to live in the real one?

  Stories are my life force, my way of coping with all the shit this world throws at you. But did I ever let her choose for herself?

  She needs to start again, but I am afraid of how she is going to be able to cope without me. If I have done enough to make her see just how capable, how brilliant, she is. I want to be able to show her, make her understand the risks you have to take if you are ever going to be happy.

  There is one possibility. But I don’t know if it’s too much. Or if I have the energy to make it happen. I must, I owe her that much.