The Shadow Between Us

by Carol Mason

  ‘Weather’s supposed to be good tomorrow,’ he says. There is a desperate plea in his eyes.

  I nod overenthusiastically. ‘Yes . . . I heard.’

  As I clear my throat, his gaze shifts to the silvery pile of garlic skins on the chopping board, the spilt oregano, the shavings of Parmesan. ‘I’ve always enjoyed cooking but I’ve never been the best at clearing up,’ I say.

  He looks like he wants to smile but can’t manage it. His eyes meet mine again, and there is something in them – a question or comment. I wait for him to verbalise it, but the spell is broken by the ringing of my phone. I’m not sure where it’s coming from at first; I’m a little off kilter. We both glance around at the same time. Ah yes. The pocket of my hoodie draped on the back of the chair. ‘Tomorrow, then,’ he says, before I go to get it, and you can almost read a degree of regret into the whole thing.

  ‘OK.’ I nod.

  He nods too, then says a clipped, ‘You have yourself a good night.’

  He doesn’t show up for the next three days. Time stretches more so than usual. I try to fill it with naps and long walks and reading but I can’t shake off the emptiness. I return to one of my old pastimes from when I’m having one of my insomnia episodes – googling recipes from BBC Good Food. I decide, OK, I’ll start making proper meals for myself, ones that require a little prep and a special shopping trip, recipes I can easily quarter so I’m forced to repeat the task the next day. It reminds me of Mark and his bread-making phase. Every morning he’d surface at 5 a.m. to put a loaf in. I remember how beautifully the house smelled on waking. Jessica’s and my glee. Then, one day, her saying, ‘Mum? Why is Dad’s bread machine sitting at the bottom of the drive?’ We both went to the window. There it was in a tough plastic bag, sitting on a white plastic stool in the rain with a big FREE sign beside it. ‘Ooh, I wonder how long before the vultures take it?’ she said, rubbing the palms of her hands together. We had often joked about the ridiculous degree to which one person’s trash was another’s treasure round here. Jessica saying, ‘They’ve all got enough money to buy their own brand new thirty-dollar wall clock – why do they need somebody’s broken one?’ She got such a kick out of trotting to the window to see if the bread machine was still there. Turns out it was gone in less than an hour.

  On Thursday I venture into a random hair salon and sit on a leather sofa pretending to read a magazine while I wait for the stylist to finish with her current client. Seems luck is on my side and I’m getting a self-absorbed twenty-something who can’t stop banging on about the quirks of her boyfriend’s Labrador, and the wedding she’s doing hair for this upcoming weekend – she won’t want to know a thing about my life. When it’s my turn in the chair, I watch her sectioning and snipping, sedated by the whimsical dance of her fingers, just like Jessica’s used to feel when I’d get her to touch up my roots. Then I close my eyes to the heat of the hairdryer, the companionable tug of her brush being the only thing that stops my chin from dropping to my chest.

  I also put in two six-hour shifts at the coffee shop. Although I told Beth I was only staying a week, I’ve found I quite like the mindless occupation of being behind the counter, the sounds of grinding and churning, air pressure and water flow; the smell of coffee on my hands all day.

  I’m at work, taking a ten-minute break, flicking through the Longfellow book, when Beth says, ‘You’re fascinated by that one, aren’t you?’

  I run my fingers over its gilt edges. ‘Yup. Read it cover to cover. I’m quite besotted with one of his shorter poems, “Loss and Gain”.’

  ‘Defeat may be victory in disguise; The lowest ebb is the turning of the tide,’ she quotes.

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘It was my sister’s.’ She looks wistful for a second. ‘Veronica’s.’

  ‘The book?’

  ‘My parents gave it to her when she turned eighteen.’ She lowers her gaze, seems reflective, but I’m too busy thinking that I gave Jessica a book of poems on her nineteenth – one my mother had given to me, that I hoped Jess would eventually pass down to her own children.

  ‘I didn’t get any such gift myself, even though I was really more into books than she was.’ She snaps me back to the moment, pulls a sad smile. ‘There was a loose piece of paper in it, with another verse written on it. The tender word forgotten. The letter you did not write. The flowers you might have sent, dear, are your haunting ghosts tonight . . . Any idea where it went to?’

  Her eyes tunnel into mine, making my cheeks bloom and turn hot. ‘Yes. I kept it. Sorry . . . I didn’t think it was of any significance to anyone. It was just . . . there.’

  She seems to stare me down. All her questions about me now answered because she thinks I nicked a poem about unwritten letters, unsent flowers and haunting ghosts – one I’ve come to know off by heart.

  ‘I’ll bring it back tomorrow.’

  ‘No need. I suspected you might have kept it.’

  I’m half tempted to say, What’s that supposed to mean? Was it some sort of trap? But enough people already think I have a mental disorder. No point in adding one more.

  ‘My sister sent it to me after her husband died. We’d argued about the book years ago – I’d made a point of telling her it should have been mine, not hers . . .’ She looks wistful again, and then something else – bitter, if I’m not wrong. ‘As for the verse, well, that was no doubt to remind me what an awful person I am, I imagine.’ She holds my eyes as though she might say more, but then turns away. I am left holding the book, conscious of latching on to this unexpected little in she’s just given me, and juggling a strange mix of thoughts: Maybe she’s not the old harridan I originally thought. Or perhaps she is, if her own sister doesn’t like her.

  To ask her more, or not to ask her more? That, there, is the question. But nothing about her says she’s inviting my prying. For want of something to do with the book, I place it back on the shelf.

  ‘Keep it,’ she says. ‘And the poem. What my sister didn’t realise is that I never needed reminding. She thought my silence meant I did.’

  I wonder if she’s being deliberately cryptic. Her words make me think of something Ned said, though. Is everyone who lives here running away from something? ‘I can’t take your book, Beth. Not when it belongs to your family. It wouldn’t be right.’

  ‘I have no family.’ Her face hardens. But then I see it’s not bitterness at all; it’s the spectre of chronic sadness. ‘Believe me, you’ll be doing me a favour. I put it out there hoping someone will steal it but no one ever does.’

  I’m still not comfortable taking it but I pluck it off the shelf again to please her. ‘I’ll hang on to it for now until you want it back,’ I tell her. ‘So it won’t fall into the wrong hands.’ In my short time working here I’ve seen many books that have gone out in good condition, come back like they’ve done a spell in the gutter in the rain.

  She doesn’t answer, just goes back to what she was doing as though the conversation never happened. But she is changed. We have walked over a grave. I go back around the counter, bury the book in my bag. Then I set about unpacking boxes of tea. I place the loose leaves into caddies as she showed me, crush packaging and put it in the recycling box, losing myself in the easy sequence of tasks, the silence, and the curious lull of unvoiced secrets, as the earth resettles again.

  Just as I’m gathering my things to leave she says, ‘Sometimes it’s easier to pretend everything’s fine than admit differently. But the problem is it becomes habit-forming until it’s our new reality. Then we’re really just living a lie.’

  I’m concluding she’s referring to her sister again, but then she meets me fully in the eyes. ‘Something you wrote.’

  I stare at her, uncomprehending.

  ‘I found it in the trash.’

  I have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. I’m about to tell her this. Then my world turns still. The letter to my parents! ‘You went through my garbage?’

  ‘Well, it’s not exactl
y your garbage if it’s on my premises.’

  ‘Hang on . . . You went through the bin and read my letter? You tampered with my mail?’ I gawk at her, thinking this must be a joke. ‘My God, isn’t that even against the law?’

  ‘Not if it rolls out, and someone just happens to pick it up. That’s just being tidy.’

  SIXTEEN

  I am in a most peculiar frame of mind when I get home, after the whole unsettling conversation with Beth. The first thing I do is take the book from my bag and reunite it with the piece of paper that has the verse written on it, which has been sitting on my night stand. But when I go to bed a short time later I can’t resist picking it up again. I must lie there staring into space for a while, but instead of it having the effect of making me sleepy, I am suddenly bursting with purpose.

  I reach for my laptop, settle it in the right angle of my thighs and tummy. For a second or two I am distracted by the screensaver of my husband and daughter – the panoramic, and slightly other-worldly, photo I took of Mark and Jessica hiking the Haleakala Crater in Maui two springs ago. They’re a couple of blunt brush strokes on that vast green landscape – streaks of red shorts and the orange reflector of a backpack. And yet I would know Mark’s lanky legs anywhere, and the punkish candyfloss of Jessica’s hair. Two days later she went in the ocean on Kaanapali Beach and was thrown by a wave. I don’t know what was more distressing to her: the fact that she got her bikini ripped almost entirely off, or that she broke her ankle. I can picture Mark and me helping her hop to our rental car, after I’d covered up her modesty with my kaftan. Mark saying, ‘Baby steps up the sand, Jessica Rabbit. Baby steps . . .’

  The Facebook app is there. I think, OK, I’ll have one more quick look at her photos from Italy, but when I go to her page they are gone. Damn technology glitches! Next I go to Sarah’s page, hoping it’s all still intact.

  ‘You’re obsessed with her,’ Mark said, the day he caught me poring over her photos. ‘Why, Olivia? You need to move on . . . This is not natural.’ I will never forget the aversion in his voice, in his eyes. Aversion for her, and for me.

  He didn’t get it and he was never going to. I accepted that. But I remember the resounding dissonance that was there every time I looked at him. The conviction in me that we had now been blown too far apart by our differences to ever come together again.

  I go through her photos again, but out of habit – a little desensitised this time. Once I’m done I stare at the message icon. 7 a.m. in England. How easily I can transport myself to their detached, red-brick home. A mother getting two little kids ready for school. Bread jumping from a toaster while she throws down a second mug of coffee. The radio on as she reaches for apples in the fridge, packs two lunch bags, her iPad open on the kitchen table showing Yahoo news that she scans while scoffing down a cereal bar.

  I imagine having some fantastical ability to travel back in time, where I would type: Don’t travel to America. Please, please don’t enter our lives. I might even tell her why.

  I imagine the ping of my message cutting through the chaos of her kitchen, causing her to look over at her iPad. That ping changing the trajectory for all of us. But then comes the powerful reminder that no one, and nothing, can.

  The message icon almost feels like it’s speaking to me.

  How do you begin to navigate what is undoubtedly the hardest thing you’ve ever had to say? Then I think, What did I once tell Ned? You make a start. Not just words in your mind, here for a minute, muddled, then gone again, buried once more beneath your fear of saying them.

  Perhaps because I have been trying so hard to compose this message at the Correspondents’ Club, it’s like I’ve suddenly awakened some sort of muscle memory. Right now it feels quite easy to type Dear Sarah.

  And this time I don’t delete it. Instead I let her name lie there, turning it over along with the image of her that’s been emblazoned on my brain. Suddenly it seems fairly obvious what comes next, so I type it before I can forget it or rationalise myself out of it.

  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come close to writing this – and how often I’ve told myself that it’s pointless. There is so much I would like to say, and the need to say it never seems to diminish. But before I begin I should probably explain who I am . . .

  SEVENTEEN

  He shows up in the late afternoon. I am on my way back from a brisk walk and as I approach the house I hear hammering coming from the backyard.

  ‘Hi,’ he says, looking surprised by my sudden presence, and stopping briefly. ‘I thought I would wait until the rain eased off.’

  Did it rain earlier? I don’t remember. ‘Well . . .’ I raise upturned palms. ‘Thanks . . .’ I wait to see if he’s going to say anything else but he goes back to his hammering; it’s like I’m not there again. Best let him get on with it, then. ‘If you need anything just knock on the door,’ I say as I pull my key from the pocket of my denim shorts.

  There is a short delay before he answers, ‘Thanks.’ The hammering stops for a beat or two while I walk towards the back door. I feel his eyes on me.

  In the kitchen I kick off my sandy pair of Toms, remembering I was supposed to buy some chicken thighs to make a small tagine for tonight but I forgot. Damn! I don’t feel like going back out again. I’m not quite sure how you really order in for one; it almost doesn’t feel worth any delivery guy’s gas. Ignoring the growl of my stomach, I open a bottle of wine, then pour myself a small glass. I stand there for a little while, unable to resist the temptation to watch him through the window while his back is turned. He appears quite content, in a drifter sort of way; a certain methodical quality to how he works seems to put him at peace with the task at hand. Watching him has a meditative effect on me, until I jolt with dread that he’s going to look up and see me.

  I wander into the living room and fall on to the sofa, feeling restless. Out of habit I reach for my laptop. No new emails. A quick click on to Messenger. No new messages. I stare for a moment at the one I sent to Sarah and am compelled to reread it.

  Ned knocks on the partly open back door around seven. ‘Bathroom?’ he says.

  ‘Sure.’ I wave for him to come in, listen to the companionable clonk of his feet.

  ‘You OK?’ He sounds a little concerned and hovers there a few steps away from me, looking slightly awkward.

  I frown. ‘Don’t I look it?’

  ‘I guess.’ I think more is coming but then he just asks, ‘Which door?’

  I tell him it’s the second on the left. I continue to stand there as he goes in. Then I hear him lift the toilet seat. I reach for the TV remote to turn up the volume to give him some privacy. Given I’ve never had any guests, it’s an unwelcome time to learn that the walls are thin.

  There is a small mirror in the front hallway. I walk over to it and peer at myself, trying to see what mysterious thing he’s just seen in my face. The dark brown eyes, lashes licked with mascara. The brown, near-shoulder-length, newly layered hair. My minimal pale pink lipstick the only hint of colour against my olive skin. I look the same to me!

  When he comes out again, I’m back on the sofa and quickly turn down the news as though I’d been watching it. ‘Can I make you a sandwich? Eggs? I haven’t had dinner myself—’

  ‘No,’ he says quickly. ‘I ate a big lunch before I got here.’

  I try not to feel snubbed, but then he adds, ‘Want to come see my progress?’

  I pick up my wine glass and we go outside. With not having eaten since noon I have a little buzz on. ‘I’d offer you a glass . . .’ I say when I catch him glancing at it, but I remember how quickly he shot down the offer last time.

  ‘To be honest alcohol has caused a lot of problems for me lately. I’m trying to stay away from it.’

  ‘Water then.’

  ‘Much better idea.’

  I disappear back inside and get him some Pellegrino with lemon.

  He’s made good progress. At least a third of the boards are in place. ‘This is fab!�
� I say. ‘I can’t wait for Nanette to see it.’

  ‘Not too shabby.’ He steps down to the grass and plonks himself into a plastic white patio chair. When he looks up at me, his gaze travels rather deliberately along my legs, which, given the lack of forewarning, stuns me a little.

  ‘I’m sorry about the other day. I can’t regulate my moods sometimes.’

  ‘It’s no crime to be quiet. You don’t have to explain.’ Now that I am pretty sure he’s just frisked me with his eyes, I feel ridiculously self-conscious. I walk over to the chair next to his and pull it out a little way so we’re not sitting too close.

  He rapid-taps his fingers on the table, then stops. ‘I want to, though.’

  I wait, aware I’m more curious than perhaps I ought to be. I try not to over-stare at him, to act like this upcoming explanation is almost incidental.

  ‘After I was burned I was pretty messed up. I couldn’t cope with my life, my marriage, my son. I couldn’t cope with the trivia of our lives, you know; what they did every day, what Lisa talked about, got upset about.’ He shakes his head, perhaps at himself. I can’t look away. ‘For months I couldn’t come to terms with myself. I couldn’t even stand to look in the mirror. My own son was scared of me. My kid couldn’t eat a meal while I was sitting at the table. I grossed him out.’

  I think of Daniel’s reaction. The honesty of children.