Yesterday's Sun

by Amanda Brooke

  Holly took a deep breath, ignoring the icy chill running through her body. She loosened her grip on the dial just long enough to pound its surface with her fists. “You didn’t have to show me how I’d fail so miserably, how I’d put myself before my daughter, just like my own mother did. You didn’t have to show me. You didn’t have to let me listen to Libby calling out to me. What you’ve given me was never a gift. You haven’t saved my life at all. You’ve given me a way to keep my body alive but you’ve taken away my soul.”

  The tremors that were coursing through her body were fueled by anger, but the heat of her emotions couldn’t compete with the bitter winter night. Holly could feel the cold seeping into her bones but she didn’t know what to do next. Still Holly couldn’t let go of the moondial. She was about to take her first step on the path that had been laid before her, a path that had come at a cruel price, but she didn’t think she could stand it.

  Closing her eyes tightly, Holly tried desperately to recall every detail of Libby’s face, her smell, the sound of her voice, the feeling of her breath as she snuggled against Holly’s neck. Focusing on just the handful of sacred moments she had shared with her daughter, Holly fought against the despair. She took a deep breath of ice-cold air that gave her the shock her system needed to let go of the dial.

  The sunrise was still a long way off. The garden was covered in shadows cast from the warm kitchen light coming from the kitchen. Instead of heading toward it, Holly took one stumbling step, then ran toward her studio.

  The studio lights hurt Holly’s eyes as they blazed to life. The photographs of smiling faces that dangled from the studio ceiling danced in the breeze from the open door like menacing clowns in a fun house. Holly felt them mocking her, showing her a happiness that had been lost to her. Frantically flicking switches, she turned down the lights until she had pushed the photographs back into the shadows.

  Holly was drawn to the center of the room, toward the shadowy figure of the mother-and-child sculpture draped in its dust sheet. Holly stepped guiltily forward and pulled off the cover. The countless faces in the spiraling form looked skyward, toward the baby held aloft by its mother, and Holly followed their gaze. She sank to her knees as the last remnant of strength that had brought her to the sculpture was ripped from her heart.

  Holly knelt next to the statue. Unable to take her eyes off the baby figure, she held on to the base like a lost child. She didn’t know if her body could stand the physical pain of her grief. She only now realized that she would be carrying her burdens alone. Tom would face his own emotions when she eventually explained it all to him, but he would never feel how she felt now. The burden of guilt rested with her and her alone. Holly wasn’t sure that their relationship would survive the gulf that would inevitably come between them. Perhaps that was what had terrified her so much when she stumbled through the empty house. Was it just children that would be missing from their lives, or would it be each other?

  Holly longed for Tom to take her in his arms and tell her it was going to be all right. She was overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness that she hadn’t felt since she was child. There was a wrenching deep in her chest and she could almost believe it was her heart physically breaking. Her first sob came out as a wretched howl and the tears that followed came in an endless torrent. As the weak wintry light of dawn trickled through the studio skylights, and with her tears still flowing, Holly slipped into a fitful sleep.

  She woke to the pounding of rain on the studio roof, which matched the pounding of her own heart and her overwhelming sense of panic. She looked up at the sculpture. The mother figure held the baby upward toward its future life. Holly had been that mother for the briefest while and that moment had been frozen in time by her own artwork.

  She got to her feet and let her fingers follow the spiral of the sculpture upward, expecting to see a crack where she had broken the chain that had linked one generation to the next. With sickening clarity, Holly realized she had made the wrong choice, and a wave of nausea was quickly followed by a tsunami of guilt and regret. Right now she should be stepping off a plane in Singapore and meeting Tom and then, at some point in the near future, making a baby out of their love, a love that would last for generations to come. That was the right path. She desperately wished she had the chance again to make a different decision, but time had run out. Her pulse quickened as she realized just how much she loved Libby and how much she was willing to sacrifice. She was a good mother, but she had realized it too late.

  Holly’s body froze as her last thoughts rattled around in her head. She would only be getting off the plane now; the point in time when Libby would or wouldn’t be conceived still lay in the future. She hadn’t yet reached the point where the two paths diverged. Her vision had shown two flickering realities, but the future hadn’t been rewritten yet; it couldn’t have been. Holly’s heart skipped a beat as she realized that there could still be time to put things right.

  “You’re going to do what?” It was Jocelyn’s turn to be shocked.

  No sooner had Holly rushed into the house and started making desperate phone calls than Jocelyn arrived. She had come under the pretext that she had some supplies to drop off in preparation for their Christmas lunch, which was to be hosted by Holly but prepared by Jocelyn. In reality, she had been looking for an excuse to check on Holly and it was immediately clear to Jocelyn that her worries had been justified.

  “I’m going to Singapore,” Holly replied firmly. She knew it was going to be tough explaining her decision to Jocelyn, and she had hoped to put off telling her until all the arrangements were in place. Unfortunately, getting a last-minute flight out to Singapore just before Christmas, or even tracking down Tom, had proven fruitless so far, but Holly wasn’t about to give up yet.

  “I don’t understand,” stumbled Jocelyn. The color had completely drained from her face. “You can’t go. You can’t take the risk of getting pregnant.”

  “No, Joss, that’s exactly why I have to go. I have to do it for Libby. My daughter comes first. I know that now. It just took a long time for me to realize it.” Holly felt warmth flooding into her heart as she heard herself say the words out loud. “I’m going to get pregnant and I’m going to give birth to Libby.”

  Jocelyn had sunk into a chair and was looking at Holly openmouthed. “Do you really understand what you’re saying, Holly? You’re talking about dying. The moondial was meant to save you. The moondial was a gift that was meant to save your life, Holly. You can’t give that up. You can’t!” Jocelyn’s voice was breaking.

  “Yes, it’s a gift. I see that now. It’s not only given me the chance to experience being a mother. It’s given me the opportunity to be the best mum I possibly could be and to prove that history isn’t going to repeat itself. I can be a better mother than my mum was to me. She sacrificed nothing, absolutely nothing. I’m ready to sacrifice everything. It’s what I want, more than anything. You have to help me.”

  Jocelyn grabbed Holly’s hand and started pleading with her. “But you still don’t know what the future holds. You saw an empty house; that means nothing.”

  Holly smiled as if that would be enough to prove to Jocelyn that she hadn’t completely lost her mind. “You don’t understand. It has nothing to do with what the future holds. I don’t know what the future would hold for me and I don’t care anymore. I really don’t. Libby is my daughter, my living, breathing daughter. Maybe not now, but I’ve seen her and I’ve held her. I know her sweet baby smell and I know every golden curl on her head. And I know I’d do anything to protect her. Anything, Jocelyn.”

  Jocelyn shook her head. “But it’s too late. You’ll never get there now, will you?”

  “I honestly don’t know, but I’m not giving up, not yet. You’ve said yourself how difficult it is to change paths. I was destined to have Libby and I have to believe it can still happen, that there’s still time.”

  The grief and despair had been lifted from Holly the moment she realized time hadn’t comple
tely run out. It was only now, as she saw the look of horror in Jocelyn’s face, that she was reminded of the price that would be paid if she was to carry out her plan. It might be her own life she was sacrificing, but it wasn’t only her life that would be affected. Tom, Jocelyn, Tom’s parents, they would all be affected, too. They would still have to suffer the devastation that Holly’s death would bring to their lives, the sense of loss that Holly had glimpsed during her journeys into the future. Then she remembered the way she had felt a few hours earlier. There was no argument in her mind. The pain her own death would cause was nothing compared to the pain of losing Libby, and she would do anything and everything she could to stop that from happening.

  “Holly, listen to me,” Jocelyn leaned over, gripping Holly’s hands painfully tight. “Think about what you’re doing, what you’re doing to the people who love you. What about me? I don’t want to lose you.” Tears were starting to trickle down her face.

  Icy tentacles of fear crept into Holly’s heart. “If I can’t save Libby then I’m lost anyway. If I survive and Libby doesn’t, then my life is over, too.”

  The hours ticked by mercilessly and the hope that Holly had grasped earlier that morning was slipping through her fingers. She had optimistically packed her bags and changed her clothes as Jocelyn kept vigil on the two phones they were using to track down a plane ticket. Holly had called in every favor, every connection she could think of, and there were countless travel agents doing their best to find her a seat on the next flight. So far, all their efforts were fruitless.

  She had still been unable to get through to Tom. She had left messages at the hotel where he was staying but he hadn’t returned her calls. His colleagues at the studio in London were next to useless; although everyone made vague promises, they were all too busy in the run-up to Christmas to help Holly get to Singapore.

  Holly’s ears were red and sore from having a phone glued to the side of her head for hours on end without reprieve. “I won’t give up. I have to put things right,” she kept telling Jocelyn. She even recovered the dust-covered broken pieces of the china cat from under the sofa and glued it back together again.

  “Do you think I should call Billy and ask him to come around and look at moving the conservatory doors back to their intended position?” she asked Jocelyn desperately.

  “You can’t put everything right. Perhaps now is the time to start accepting that there are things you can’t change.”

  Holly shook her head, but as she looked out of the window, the light was already starting to fade along with her hope. They were sitting at the kitchen table, hugging steaming-hot cups of tea. As Holly’s mood dipped lower and lower, Jocelyn did her best to hide her relief.

  “You tried your damnedest, Holly. I know it’s going to be hard and you won’t want to forgive yourself, but at least now you know you were prepared to give up everything for Libby.”

  “I was so sure I had time,” Holly whispered. She put down her cup and stood up, peering into the darkness outside, looking toward the moondial. “I spent so much time fighting it, and now that I’m ready to give in, the damned thing has let me go.”

  “You’ll get through this. You’ll find a new path.”

  Holly stepped over to the kitchen door. She fought the urge to go out into the rain and shake the moondial into life again. Instead, she looked at the windowpane in the door and watched the raindrops hit the glass and then trickle downward. “I was so sure I could get back to the old path, the one that led to Libby.” Holly’s finger traced a single droplet as it slipped down the window, sliding neatly into the path of a raindrop that had fallen before. “I’m sorry, Libby,” she whispered. A shiver ran up her spine and tingled down to her finger touching the glass. Out of the darkness, another finger on the other side of the glass reached out and met her fingertip.

  Holly gasped but she didn’t withdraw her finger. Instead she looked beyond the finger, to a hand, a strong hand that could hold on to Holly’s and never let go. Beyond the hand was an arm, one of two that could wrap themselves around her and make her feel like she was safe from anything. Holly looked on in wonderment at the chest, the neck, and the face of the man she loved and it took her breath away.

  “Are you going to let me in?” cried Tom, shivering in the rain.

  Holly opened the door and flung herself into his arms. She fought back the tears only long enough to cover Tom’s face in kisses.

  “Hey, you’re leaking,” he said.

  “No, I’m not leaking. I’m crying,” Holly replied with a triumphant smile before leaning in and giving Tom a very long and deliciously sweet kiss.

  “You’ve still got stinky breath,” he said with a wicked smile.

  “Me? You’re the one who smells like he hasn’t been washed in a fortnight.”

  “Well, what do you expect from someone who’s spent the last two days trying to get home to his poor, sick wife?” Tom demanded.

  Holly held on to Tom and let the rain beat down on them. Tom, a little more eager to get into the house, lifted her up in his arms and carried her inside. Holly looked over his shoulder at the moondial and for the first time she smiled at it.

  “Well, it looks like I’ve got my early Christmas present,” Holly said, turning toward Jocelyn, but Jocelyn had gone.

  “Do you think I should give her a lift home?” Tom asked.

  Holly took a sad, sharp intake of breath. “She’ll be all right.”

  Tom looked tired as he stood dripping and shivering in the middle of the kitchen, still holding Holly in his arms. “So is there anything I can do for you?” he asked with a mischievous grin.

  “Oh, I’ve got plans; don’t you worry,” she said.

  13

  Christmas was perfect and Holly couldn’t have asked for more. She spent the festive season surrounded by family—Tom, his parents, Jocelyn, and Jocelyn’s extended family, including Lisa and her daughter, Patti, who was home from university and relished the opportunity to pick Tom’s brain.

  Jocelyn put on a brave face, but Holly knew her heart was breaking. Holly made sure they had plenty of time together and insisted on walking Jocelyn home after Christmas dinner and accepted her invitation to come in for a quick cup of tea.

  Holly had never actually been in Jocelyn’s flat before and it surprised her how small and crowded it was. There were two armchairs pinched around a portable television, but Jocelyn and Holly chose to sit at the small bistro table that was obviously a castoff from the tea shop. The table was in front of the one and only window, and a host of winter pansies trembled outside in the breeze. Beyond the window box there was a view of the church, and Jocelyn’s face matched the grayness of its stone facade. It was the first opportunity they had had to speak about the future and for Holly to give Jocelyn an extra Christmas present. It was the journal and the wooden box containing the glass orb and deconstructed brass mechanism.

  “I can’t use it again,” explained Holly. “I can’t take any risks, not while I’m pregnant. Besides, I don’t need to visit Libby. I have her with me every day.” Holly patted her perfectly flat stomach. “I need you to look after these now because I don’t want the moondial to fall into the wrong hands. Tom must never know about the dial and what it can do. It’s cast its shadow for long enough.”

  “If I’d known what you would end up doing, I’d have taken the box off you sooner.”

  “I know this is hard for you, but I need you now more than ever,” Holly insisted. “For the last eight months, my emotions have been in utter chaos and it wasn’t just affecting me. It was affecting my relationship with Tom, too. Everything was becoming so fraught. There was so much distance growing between us and I don’t mean just the miles. Right now I feel so at peace with myself, with Tom, and it feels wonderful. The only pain I feel now is my heart bursting with all this love for my husband and my baby.” Holly’s voice was cracking with emotion and she was desperate for Jocelyn to find her own peace.

  Jocelyn’s cup was trembling in
her hand and she took a sip of tea before she could bring herself to speak. “What’s done is done. I’ll look after these and I’ll do whatever I can to help you and Tom, and when the time comes, Libby, too. I let you down, but I promise I won’t let her down.”

  “You didn’t let me down; don’t ever think that. You let me make my own decisions and choose my own path. That’s a decision for my conscience, not yours, and it was the right decision. You won’t ever convince me otherwise.” It was Holly’s turn to start trembling and her voice shook.

  Jocelyn would only nod politely and Holly sensed she would never agree, at least not until she saw Libby.

  “I’m going to have everything planned out and ready for Libby’s arrival and for Tom’s future without me, but I’ll need you to keep reminding Tom of my plans when I’m gone.” Holly was surprised at how easy the words fell off her tongue. She wasn’t ready to die yet, but nine months was time enough to get everything prepared. “Tom’s job is the only fly in the ointment so far. He’s still determined to take up the anchorman post and when he finds out I’m pregnant, it’s going to make it even more difficult to persuade him to rethink his options. The studio is livid with him for bailing out in Singapore and they’ll make his life miserable, as if it weren’t going to be bad enough already. I’m determined to convince him to go freelance. He’s made some good contacts in the last year and he can use that to his advantage. I think his globetrotting days are over, but he is about to be a dad so that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s a better career for him out there. All I have to do is point him in the right direction.”

  Jocelyn reached out and cupped Holly’s face in her hands. “Take a breath, Holly. Like you said, there’s enough time to plan.”

  Holly smiled and a tear rolled down her cheek. “I know. And I know I’m going to hurt people. I just want to soften the blow.”

  “You can’t, but I’ll do what I can,” Jocelyn said, smiling weakly.