The Summer of Impossible Things

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘Very well,’ I tell him. ‘Better than I’ve ever seen her.’

  ‘And what brings her back to Brooklyn?’ Mr Gillespie leans a little closer to me, so that I can feel the weight of him against my shoulder. ‘Is she selling the old building at last, because if I can be of any assistance to her, just tell her, will you? I’d be happy to help in any way. I know a lot of people round here, lots of very well-connected people. You tell her … just mention my name to her and tell her I can make sure she gets what she wants.’

  ‘I’ll tell her,’ I say, and then a thought crosses my mind. ‘How did you know I would be here?’

  ‘Well, you’ve come here every day since you all arrived, sitting there staring at the bridge, looking for all the world like you are waiting for someone who never comes,’ Watkins Gillespie tells me. ‘Looking kind of lonely and sad, if I’m honest. So today I thought I’d come and meet you here.’

  ‘Did you used to know a man called Michael Bellamo?’ I ask him, tasting the name of my lips, savouring it.

  ‘Ah, yes, young Michael, I knew him. He sold up after his father died, went to live in California.’

  ‘Did he marry?’ I ask him, slowly bracing myself. ‘Have children? Do anything with his life?’

  ‘Well, now, is it your mother you are asking for?’ Watkins asks, and I nod.

  ‘Be careful then how you tell her, I know they were friends.’

  ‘Tell her what?’ A tight string draws its way around my heart.

  ‘Last I heard, Michael never married. Never had children. Went to California to try and be a writer, and he did pretty well too, had a pretty good life, travelled a lot, had a lot of friends. Not famous exactly, but he made a living from it. Had a pretty nice place near the beach.’

  ‘He did?’ I smile, and again hesitate, and again hold my breath. ‘And where is he now, still in California?’

  ‘Oh no, my dear.’ Mr Gillespie shakes his head. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you Michael passed away, ten years ago now. Swimming accident.’

  ‘No,’ I say, shaking my head, over and over. ‘No, that’s not right. He didn’t die. I mean Michael Bellamo, his father owned Sam’s Bakery?’

  ‘Yes, dear, will that upset your mother, do you think? Oh dear, you look quite pale.’ Watkins Gillespie put his arm around my shoulder; I feel his hand tighten on my upper arm, and let myself fold into his shoulder, let tears flow into his suit, soaking through to his shirt, and I don’t try to check them, I don’t try to stop. I cry for a man that could never be mine, for a life that I lost and found, and must lose again. Mr Gillespie doesn’t move, he doesn’t speak, he just lets me cry until I am done.

  And when I’m done the sky beyond the bridge blazes with colour, a last glorious haze of beauty before this day dies and is gone; not for good, just for now.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, sitting up, wiping my tears, and pushing my hair back from my face. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mr Gillespie says. ‘I never like to make a young lady cry.’

  ‘I should go,’ I say. ‘I’ve got a lot to do. I don’t know what to say … Thank you.’

  Removing his arm from around my shoulder he takes my hand, between his two.

  ‘I don’t know how it’s possible,’ he says, ‘but I do feel like I know you, somehow. There’s something about you that’s so familiar to me. You can come to me, anytime you want. Whatever happens, you remember that. You and your mother, you can come to me, and I’ll help.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, squeezing his hand, and it’s a moment before he will let my fingers go. ‘Take care, Mr Gillespie.’

  ‘Remember me to your mother,’ Mr Gillespie calls out after me. ‘Remember to tell her if she needs any help, to call me. I know a lot of people. I can make things happen.’

  ‘I will,’ I say, although I won’t. There’s no point; after tonight everything will be different once again.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

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  The part of Mrs Finkle’s house that belongs to her alone is bathed in shadows and silence when I let myself in through the door.

  ‘Hello?’ I call out, but there is no reply, and I’m sad. I would have liked to have seen her one more time, to say goodbye. I can hear movement in the apartment even before I get to the top of the stairs, and I wait for a moment, before letting myself in, reminding myself that this must be a goodbye where that one word is never used.

  ‘There you are. Don’t you answer your phone anymore?’ Pia asks me the moment I shut the door behind me.

  ‘I lost it,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry, I just needed to clear my head.’

  ‘Honestly, Luna, you are such a ditz,’ Pia says, and I pause. No, I’m not, I’m not the one who is a ditz, am I? I pause for a moment, struggling to recall my life apart from my family, and I remember that Brian is at home, in the flat we share, that we talked last night and he said our cat had ripped the sofa to shreds, and I remember that I found text messages from him to another girl on his phone, but I hadn’t found a way to ask him about them yet, and it hurt my pride but not my heart, because I’ve never really been in love with him. And I remember my job with a start, because it is not my job. I am not doing what I love anymore, what I’ve always wanted to do. I’m in PR.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Mum greets me with an arm around my waist, pulling me to her. ‘That was a tough one. She talked a lot, she wanted to talk a lot. I think she is finding life tough on her own. She’s been using drugs, drinking. You know … this is my fault, if I’d spoken up before.’

  ‘It isn’t, it isn’t your fault. It’s his,’ Pia says. ‘Mum, speak up now. It isn’t too late. Name him, tell the world about him. It’s not like you’d be the only one.’

  ‘When the time is right,’ Mum says. ‘This isn’t about vengeance, not yet. It’s about lives, real people. Pulling them together, making them strong. And then … then we’ll see. I wish, I just wish I’d killed him that night. There was a moment, when maybe I could have; I’ve thought about it a million times since. I just wish I had.’

  ‘No, you don’t, Mum,’ I tell her. ‘You don’t wish that at all. You’re not a killer, you’re not. But you are a hero, you’re my hero.’

  ‘Luna’s right, Mum,’ Pia says. ‘And look, Patricia is still young, and everything we are doing now, supporting other women who have been victims, that’s giving each and every one of them, including you, a chance to start afresh, to turn a new page; even Patricia can do that, once she knows that she’s believed and that people care about her. You’re doing that for her, and the others.’

  ‘I wish I could be stronger, strong enough,’ Mum says.

  ‘Everything you’ve done, even just surviving this far, it’s been more than enough.’ I put my arms around her and hug her tight. A goodbye with no goodbyes. ‘You’re brave and strong and wonderful. And I just … I want you to know, Mum, that I have always loved you. Every version of you, all you have ever been, I have loved. And I know you’ve loved me, despite everything you went though. I love you and Dad and Pia – you’ve all been the joy in my life. I’ve been so lucky, so blessed to have been part of it all.’

  Mum’s brow furrows and I know I have allowed too much of what I am really feeling to spill out.

  ‘What’s wrong, Luna?’ she asks. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ I tell her. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  ‘Well, that’s impossible for any mother,’ she says. ‘One day you will find that out.’

  ‘I should cook something,’ Pia says, and I almost laugh out loud; the idea of my sister as a person who cooks is a funny one. ‘Mum, here’s a large glass of wine. Luna, come and help me chop things.’

  She hands Mum the glass, and gives me a pointed look.

  ‘Chop things, what things?’ I ask her once we are in the small kitchen.

  Pia is silent as she take
s out two large onions, puts them on a board and hands me a knife.

  ‘Chop,’ she tells me, with a nod of her smooth hair. ‘Dice not slice, and while you are at it, you can tell me why you are saying goodbye to us.’

  ‘I’m not saying goodbye.’ My eyes sting and a tear rolls down my cheek, breaking on the back of my hand.

  ‘You are,’ Pia says. ‘I don’t know why, but you are. It feels like you’re leaving us, for good, Luna. Why do I feel like that?’

  ‘I’m not,’ I protest, the tears still flowing. ‘I just wanted to say that I love you guys, that’s all.’

  ‘I know I haven’t been around so much,’ Pia begins. ‘That I’ve let my job and Andrew take over a bit, but you realise, don’t you, that I still bloody love you. You get that, right? Because you seem a bit disconnected, somehow, like you’re not all here.’

  ‘I’m here right now,’ I say, putting the knife down and drying my eyes. ‘So, why don’t we top up our glasses and drink to us, to the best two sisters the world has ever known.’

  ‘Well, there’s no need to go over the top,’ she says.

  13 JULY

  ‘Love is space and time measured by the heart.’

  —Marcel Proust

  ‘Three days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.’

  —John Keats

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

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  This is my last day on earth, my last day as Luna Sinclair, and after that, I don’t know what I will be or where. Perhaps I’ll be a billion different things, travelling in opposite directions, flowing from one universe to another, free of knowing what I am. Although it started twenty-nine years ago, this is where my journey truly began, and where it will end, tonight.

  I’ve grown up all of my life with this sense of … not foreboding; no, that isn’t the right word. But with the knowledge that something was coming, something very far away at first, but with every day, hour and second that ticked by, I felt something draw slowly nearer and fractionally louder. It was so constant that I got used to it, tuned it out, choosing a life where I stay more or less within the same fifty square miles I grew up in, child, student, teacher, girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, sister, daughter. Unremarkable markers of who I am, who I was. I didn’t see then what I see now, that the things that make us unremarkable are also the very things we’ll fight to death to protect. Unremarkable things turn us into heroes.

  We live in this world where bad people get to do terrible things, and more often than we know or want to admit they get away with it. No comeback, no justice. They do terrible things and even if they are punished, they still have that, the knowledge and the memories of it. Not him, he won’t have that. Because I am going to make this one tiny corner of everything safe from him. Bad men will rise and rise again, but not this one. This one is almost done.

  And God only knows that it’s not that I don’t want to live, because I do, more than I ever have. Only now, at the brink of the end, have I really known what it means to be alive, to dance, to love, to fear and to want. I want to live more than anything. But that’s just what I want, not what I must do … And somehow, wanting it is enough. It’s almost enough; wanting life so badly means that I have lived it, at least.

  This is when my wonderful, terrifying, tragic, beautiful and impossible journey began, and here is where it will end. As for what will become of me when I take that last step, I have no idea.

  I don’t sleep; sleeping would seem like a terrible waste. I wait until Mum goes to bed in the little bedroom, pressing a kiss to my forehead. Pia drifts off on her half of the sofa bed, her legs sprawling into my territory. In sleep she is the same old Pea, chaotic and haphazard, as dear to me as my own life.

  As she mutters in her sleep I climb carefully out of bed, relishing every sensation, the cool floor beneath my tired feet, the water running over my fingers as I turn the tap on and fill a glass. Even the exhaustion that’s deep in my bones, and crowding my peripheral vision with flash hallucination, I greet with open arms; this is what it means to be human. This is what it feels like.

  Looking out at the houses across the street, I wait until the lights go out, one by one. The street becomes quiet and still, just a breath of wind as I open all of the windows as wide as they will go and lean into the night, closing my eyes to feel hot air passing over my skin. I tell the wind my story, I tell it to the universe, and to the dense, black and hidden stars. Not to be heard, not to be believed, but just so I know myself that this has all been real, that I was real, and this happened to me.

  It’s funny how quickly I got used to Mum being here, being real, asleep in the next room, the sound of her breathing even and steady. Then, I suppose I never really got used to her being gone, that never felt real to me. I push open the door to her room, just a crack, and, for a little while, watch her, listen to her. I try to remember everything, everything we ever did or said or felt together, the warmth of her hugs, the sound of her heartbeat, the way only her kisses could heal grazed knees, the way that she always tried to understand me, how she tried to never cry in front of me, how she always smiled whenever she saw me, even though smiling was the last thing she felt like doing, how she fought every day of her life and showed me how to fight every day of mine.

  When I step in the freezing shower, letting it run cold as ice to keep me alert and awake, the rivulets of water drive into me, forcing me to stir myself for action. I stay there as long as I can, turning my back to the shower, bracing myself against the pain of the cold. Still wrapped in my towel, hot, strong, black coffee warms me from the inside out, cup after cup, until my heart races in my chest, tripping over itself as it accelerates. Everything is in perfect focus, maximum resolution. Every one of my nerve endings is calcified and brittle, like a stiff wind could blow me to pieces. I am nearly done, almost at the end.

  Dressing carefully, I choose my oldest jeans, white T-shirt, dependable Converse. I don’t have any sort of weapon, so I take a kitchen knife from the magnetic holder on the wall, but it is too long. I put it back and find a folding fruit knife in the drawer; it’s small but sharp.

  It’s funny, it makes me want to laugh out loud, and I press my hands over my mouth: the idea of me overpowering a man and bringing him down with a folding fruit knife. And, anyway, even if I can overpower a man twice my size, to actually do it, to actually kill him. I know who I am; I know I’m still my mother’s daughter, who would never harm another living thing. It’s my father’s daughter who must take charge this time. I remember Henry’s penknife, the one I left behind the vent in the Lupo’s kitchen. I left it there a long time ago, before the universes split and reformed. Putting the fruit knife back in the drawer, I hope it will still be there.

  One last thing. I set the camera up on a pile of books, switching the flash on and setting the timer to ten seconds. I sit on a chair opposite and look into the lens. Chances are that after tonight this camera, this image, won’t exist, but if I could take one photo of the past who knows, maybe I can take one now of this present? And if Pea finds an image of a strange woman in the prints if she ever gets the film developed, well, then at least she would have seen my face, even if it meant nothing to her.

  Just as I am about to leave, I stop beside my sleeping sister, gently touching her hand with the tips of my fingers. Taking great care, I set my camera down on my pillow for her to find. There might be grander reasons to give up your life than your own family, but not for me. How hard, how almost impossible it is, to find the strength to turn my back on them both and to gently pull the door to a close, but I do.

  Tiptoeing down the stairs, the shadows thrown by the moonlight dance on the walls of photographs, somehow bringing them to life. Moment after moment explodes into action, candles blown out, kisses shared, a thousand smiles and bursts of laughter follow me on my path, through the front door and out into the dark of a very early morn
ing.

  All is still, the heat only now just peeling away to leave the world cooling at the edges. Everywhere I look there is exquisite beauty, the wooden-fronted houses, the slumbering trees and the cars that line the sidewalk all seem to shine, even in the absence of light. Dawn is hours away yet, but I know where I want to start my last day. My feet quicken, breaking into a jog, as my need to be in one particular place balloons inside me, lifting me up, driving me on. The pain in my lungs resisting, my heart pounding, the ache in the soles of my feet and my shins reverberating are all reminders that I am flesh and blood, and it’s wonderful.

  When I find the bench I collapse onto it, feeling my cheeks burn and sweat prickle my scalp. The bridge reaches out of the dark, still and elegant, stretching up towards the fading stars.

  With the bridge as my companion, I imagine a life, a life where I’m married to a man with green eyes; a life where we take walks on long beaches, dogs and children playing around our feet. In that life, every night we’d kiss goodnight with just as much passion as the night we first kissed, with just as much tenderness and urgency, because we’d know what it would be like to lose the love we have. And so it would never be commonplace to us, never be routine or become tired. Our love would be one that would stretch through a whole lifetime, and when the time came, a very, very long time from now, we’d part, just for a little while, knowing we could not have loved each other more.

  Perhaps the story becomes a dream, or even for a little while it’s somehow real; I don’t know which, but do know I whisper it on to the wind as if it were a prayer, as the hours until sunrise slowly unwind, and when the day breaks, it breaks in 1977. For the first time there is no pain, no sense of loss or mismatch on my journey.

  I am exactly where I am meant to me.

  As the sun rises, the heat builds with slow determination, even this early. I wait until the sky is a perfect dome of blue, and the traffic has begun to build on the bridge. Standing, I stretch my arms out into the sky, until every muscle sings like a plucked string. One last time I look at the bridge, and, pressing my fingertips to my lips, I blow it a kiss, before heading down 3rd Avenue, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn – the very last place you’d think a person might be able to change the world.