‘One day I’m going to shout and scream about my love for you in front of a crowd. I’ll stand on a bench.’
‘A bench?’
‘Yes, a beautiful bench.’
A smile forms on my lips; I try to bite it away. I can’t believe I’ve fallen for this trick again. Every single time, Willow, every single time.
‘I dropped my beer for you.’
‘Whoa, now that is love.’
After lying in the middle of the road for a while, by some miracle not getting run over, we walk back to Dustin’s house. I could have stayed out there with him for ever. But it’s getting late. We get to the house, and the door is locked. Dustin tries calling Alicia, but she doesn’t answer. He is just resigning himself to calling his mum, when Carol opens the door, her face contorted with fury. She doesn’t stand back to let us in.
‘Why are you back so late?’ she says.
‘Mum, it’s a weekend. I don’t think we need to be—’
‘How much have you had to drink?’ she hisses.
‘I don’t know, a few? It doesn’t matter.’ Dustin grabs onto my hand, trying to pass by her, but she moves forward to block our way.
‘You both stink of alcohol,’ she says, eyes flicking between me and Dustin. Even with all the alcohol in my system, butterflies start nervously fluttering in my tummy. As if he can tell, Dustin wraps his arm around me, pulling me closer to him.
‘Well, we’ve been at the pub. Now it’s cold, I’m sorry if we woke you up, but next time can you not lock the door?’ Dustin says, lightly pushing past her and into the house, pulling me behind him.
‘You’re being rude now, Dustin.’
‘I’m not being rude, Mum.’ He disappears into the kitchen leaving me and his mum alone. Why did he leave me? Did he think I was behind him? Don’t leave me alone. Why am I not following him?
Carol sniffs the air, and glares at me. ‘Willow, I can smell it.’
My stomach drops further, as I feel heat rise to my cheeks.
Keep it together. I’m too scared to look in Carol’s eyes. ‘Sorry?’
‘You smell of smoke, and frankly it’s disgusting.’
‘I … I haven’t been—’
‘You better not get my son into that dirty habit.’
‘Mum, what the fuck?’ Dustin has reappeared and is standing in front of me.
‘All both of you do now is get drunk, waste your money on dinners out and the pub, when you know money is tight for me, and that really upsets me. I have no issue with enjoying things when you’re young, but you two are just plain profligate.’
‘But for us, those things aren’t a waste of money. That’s what we want to spend it on – having fun with our friends and with each other.’
Wait, did I just say that? Where did that come from?
There’s a silence after I finish speaking.
Carol gapes at me, and I feel immediate regret for opening my mouth. ‘Sorry?’
‘Well … I was just saying, just because you may think it’s a waste it doesn’t mean—’
‘Willow, don’t be rude to me, please.’
‘The only one that is being rude is you, Mum.’
But Carol hasn’t taken her eyes off me. ‘I have to say you won’t be welcome here if you turn up drunk on my doorstep again.’
‘Mum, maybe you’re the drunk one,’ Dustin mutters, as he starts dragging us both up the stairs.
‘Before you were with her, you’d never talk to me like that. What’s all that about?’ She’s shouting now and I can’t get up the stairs fast enough.
Once we’re safely in Dustin’s room, I try desperately to hold my tears in.
There’s a knock and Alicia appears at the door, dressed in pyjamas, her tired eyes peering at us. ‘You all right?’ she says.
Dustin shakes his head. ‘Mum,’ he says.
Chapter 33
Dustin
I find myself at the college. I don’t know what made me come this way. I was barely even aware of where I was going until suddenly I rounded a corner, and there it was. I guess classes are still going on, because the gates are deserted.
I lean against the fence like I used to, waiting for Willow to finish her classes. She would come out of the gates, dwarfed by an enormous backpack, a book or two under one arm, and then she’d see me, and her tired eyes would light up and she’d be running to hug me. Every single time.
That was in the awkward stage where we were dating, but unsure of how to progress from there. I agonised over how to get to the next step with her. How did people go from dating to a relationship? I couldn’t figure it out. And yes, everyone was surprised because I was Dustin, the guy who never seemed to have trouble in that department, the guy with all the experience. But the truth was I didn’t have a clue what I was doing for so much of those early stages with Willow. I had zero experience with a proper relationship, and I wanted a relationship with Willow. She was going to be my forever girl.
Mum is wrong about Willow, she always has been wrong about Willow. She was the best thing to come into my life. She gave me purpose and meaning, she’s what kept me moving forwards.
So how the hell have I ended up back here?
Slumped against the fence, I pull out my phone absent-mindedly, open up Instagram and search, as I do hundreds of times every day, for Willow’s handle. Nothing.
Then it hits me. Were her accounts private? I had assumed so because Willow is inherently such a private person, but it dawns on me that I never actually checked. Hands trembling slightly, I log out of my account, and tap ‘Create new account’ on the home screen. I need a new email address. I bring up gmail and do the same thing. I choose the first thing that comes to mind for the email name: [email protected]
Once the email account is created, it’s a matter of minutes to set up a new Instagram account. Feeling my breath catch in my throat, I type Willow’s handle into the search bar.
She comes up instantly. I tap her profile. A grid of images flashes before me. Her account isn’t private. I don’t know how I long I spend like that, scrolling through her old photos, intently studying each one. Three weeks ago, only a week before she disappeared, she posted a photo of the three of us – Willow, Zara and me at the weekend. She captioned it: ‘The Three Musketeers’. We’re walking to our favourite café, Zara on Willow’s hip. I’m holding the camera, grinning like an idiot. I stare at my own face, almost unrecognisable in its easy, confident contentment. Willow is smiling. I remember that day so clearly – it was a happy one. I pinch to zoom in on Willow’s face. Was that a real smile? Before that she posted a photo of Zara asleep, captioned it: ‘Mummy’s gorgeous angel’. But how did Mummy manage to leave her gorgeous angel behind? Before that she posted a photo of the view of Brighton beach, caption: ‘Home is where the heart is’.
‘Well, where the hell is that then, Willow?’ I don’t mean to say it out loud but I do and the bitterness in my own voice surprises me. The more I look at the happy little life we had, the life she documented on social media, the more I struggle to understand what went wrong. What am I missing?
I scroll through the grid of her posts. Perfect squares of bright, sunny happiness. Where are the cracks? Then my thumb knocks the tab at the top of the screen and a new grid pops up. Her tagged photos. I sit up. I’ve never seen these before. Why have I never looked at her tagged photos?
She hasn’t been tagged in many, most are from my account: Zara’s first birthday, Liam’s house party years ago, a picture of her and Gran cooking in the flat in New Haw. Wow, times change. Then there’s a few tagged photos from Gee’s, and one posted by my old work friends, when she went to my Christmas do a couple of years back. All pretty standard …
I pause.
There’s one photo I don’t recognise. It’s Willow, and when I peer at the caption I can see the date is from three months ago. She’s sitting with Zara in her lap at a coffee shop. She is smiling at the camera but I notice her eyes straight away. They’re wide
and red and her face is slightly puffy. She’s been crying. She has a cappuccino on the table and I recognise from the mug that she’s in the independent coffee shop we used to go to when we first moved to Brighton. The one with the books on the shelves, the recycled menus, the chalkboard on which I’d draw bad self-portraits of us both. Then over time these turned to bad self-portraits with a little baby in the tummy, then self-portraits with a baby in a pram. We haven’t been to that café in ages. I can’t remember why now. I guess we just drifted to new places.
So who was she with? And why was she crying?
I peer at the username: Jake Woods.
My brain desperately racks its library for some sort of explanation, any piece of obscure knowledge connected with this person. But nothing.
Who the hell is Jake Woods?
Willow never mentioned him. I’m sure Willow never said his name, let alone mentioned that they went out for a coffee. What is this part of her life I know nothing about?
I click onto his account. Private.
Of course it bloody is.
I’m suddenly aware of a prickling sensation on the back of my neck. Instinctively I turn around to see a man across the road. He’s just standing there in the middle of the pavement and he’s watching me. He’s tall and stocky, wearing a scruffy overcoat pulled right up to his scruffy salt and pepper beard. He looks familiar.
Wait, he is familiar. It’s the man I hit with the pram, outside my house that first morning back.
‘Hey.’ I walk towards him. ‘Hey!’
But he turns around and walks away. And for some reason I can’t explain, I don’t follow.
Chapter 34
Dustin
I go back inside the house grudgingly.
I can see straight away Mum isn’t there because her coat isn’t hanging up in the hall, but when I go into the kitchen I find Alicia sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by a Pot Noodle, a bottle of wine and a smaller bottle of Fanta. I know without looking into her glass that she will have mixed the red wine with the Fanta. It all started after a boy she went on a date with recommended it. The guy didn’t last but her love for Fanta and wine did.
‘Where’s Zara?’ I ask. I can hear the exhaustion in my voice.
‘Upstairs, asleep,’ Alicia says, taking a sip of her wine-Fanta cocktail. ‘I gave her a bath and she nodded straight off.’
That sounds very unlike Zara. Why doesn’t she ever nod straight off with me? I go to the fridge to get a beer – it is Friday, after all – and I find a Tupperware with a sticky note on it.
Dear Dustin, here’s some shepherd’s pie for your dinner. Let’s forget about earlier. Love you, Mum x
I sigh. I wish I hadn’t argued with Mum. What did I expect her reaction was going to be? She wasn’t going to side with Willow was she? I think of Jake’s Instagram photo, the picture of Willow on his feed. And what if, at the end of the day, she was a little bit right about Willow? I slam the fridge door shut.
‘So you came back then,’ Alicia says, arching an eyebrow, as I sit down at the table with the Tupperware and the beer.
‘Where else was I going to go?’ I reply, with a half smile that quickly dissolves.
Alicia doesn’t reply. I struggle to think of a way to keep the conversation going. ‘Didn’t want Mum’s shepherd’s pie, then?’
Alicia shakes her head. ‘I’m in the mood for crap.’
‘Where is she?’
Alicia looks at me. ‘Her friend’s house.’
I frown. ‘I’ve never known Mum to have friends.’
‘Well she does now,’ she says, prodding her Pot Noodle.
I wonder if Mum told her why we argued. Alicia isn’t exactly forthcoming, but she hasn’t completely shut me down either, which is something.
‘Seems like you’re having a wild Friday night,’ I say.
‘Elliot is out with friends.’
‘You’re not friends with his friends?’
Alicia shakes her head. ‘You know you and Willow were an anomaly. It’s rare for couples to share friends like you did.’
We didn’t share all of our friends though, did we, Willow? Some we decided to keep secret …
‘Anyway,’ Alicia continues. ‘Elliot’s friends are so much older. They act like middle-aged men.’ She gestures to the bottle. ‘Do you want some wine?’
I leap at the sign of some generosity from my sister. ‘Yeah, I’d love some, thanks.’ I push my unopened bottle of beer further down the table.
Alicia stands and returns it to the fridge for me, then grabs a wine glass from the cupboard.
‘What about your friends?’ I ask. ‘Didn’t you want to see them tonight?’
She sits back down, placing the wine glass in front of me. ‘I don’t really have friends.’ She shrugs. ‘My school friends are all at uni now, and the people in my year are younger than me, and you can really tell, you know? So, I don’t really see many people at the moment.’
I smile sadly at her. ‘Join the club.’ I pause. ‘Well, I do have Zara, but she’s not very good on the conversation front, you know.’
I see the briefest of smiles on Alicia’s face as she pours wine into my glass.
‘Yeah, it’s the same with me and Elliot. I just spend all my time with him.’ She opens the Fanta bottle. ‘But you’ve always had lots of friends, Dustin. Here you had loads of friends, and it seemed from photos in Brighton you did too. You want Fanta, too?’
‘Yeah, go ahead.’
We sip on our Fanta and wine concoctions in silence, and I’m surprised by how weirdly nice it is.
‘Alicia … ’ She’s waiting for me to complete the sentence but now it feels like the words are lodged in my throat. ‘I … I’m sorry for leaving home.’
She frowns. ‘Dustin, I’m not hurt at you for leaving home. I was there for that, remember? I know why you left. I know you had to. I’m hurt because you left my life. I needed you.’
I don’t have anything to say to this and so she continues. ‘I needed my brother, and you left me. I was being punished for yours and Mum’s problem. It wasn’t fair. I hated Willow for a long time. It helped me to believe that it was her, rather than you. But she messaged me. She was the one who let me know about the baby, she was the one who said she tried, she was the one who said sorry, and I realised I couldn’t blame her. I had to be honest to myself that it was you. You made those choices, you cut me off.’
I stare at her. I never knew that Willow had messaged Alicia.
But then again, I’m starting to realise there were many things I never knew about Willow.
I think about it. I guess I did just cut my sister out. She had sent me so many messages in the early days – fearful at first, and then angry – and I didn’t know what to do with them. Then she sent me that drunken voice note. She called me all sorts of names, told me she hated me and yeah, I was annoyed by that. She had been there, had seen the situation Mum had put me in. Why did she think sending me bitter, offensive messages would help? And I couldn’t see what I could say to make the situation better. So I didn’t say anything. Saying nothing, cutting yourself off from your feelings somehow seemed better for me.
‘I’m sorry … if I had known everything would go so wrong when I left then maybe I wouldn’t have actually left for real,’ I say, rubbing a hand through my hair.
Alicia stares at me. ‘What do you mean?’
‘With you still at school, and Mum … being the way she is being – she will barely let me out of her sight now, she obviously struggled, and I just feel so guilty … ’
‘Dustin, it hasn’t been easy at all, yeah – but it’s not like we’ve fallen apart without you. I might be retaking school but I’m really happy with Elliot – I like my life – I just would have preferred you to be in it for the past couple of years. And yeah, Mum didn’t deal well at all. She had a proper breakdown. She had to go to therapy.’
‘Oh … ’
‘But the point is, we’re OK now. There was a time wh
en it didn’t feel possible, but our lives have kept on going without you. After you get over the hard bit it gets easier. People adapt.’
And will this be the same for me? Can I keep my life going without Willow in it? Does it mean it’s possible?
‘But Mum is OK, she is even seeing someone. She dates her therapist. That’s the “friend” she is seeing.’
I think my mouth drops to the table. ‘Dating? Mum has never … dated.’
Alicia shrugs, tracing the rim of her glass. ‘Yeah, I know, but after you went, I think the fact Mum had someone who made her feel like she mattered was important to her.’
‘Is that allowed though? A therapist dating one of their clients?’
‘Well, she isn’t Mum’s therapist any more.’
‘Wait – she?’ I say.
Alicia nods her head. ‘Wow, who knew.’
‘It’s just a bit of a weird one, like we’ve never met her and they’ve been dating for a year now.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s fine, Mum seems happier. That’s all that matters. She’s easier to deal with. But I will say that half the shit that she says and does around you is an act. She’s scared of losing you again. She’s still Mum, deep down. She still worries, and she still seems terrified of losing me. Like I said, why do you think Elliot was invited to move in? So I don’t move out and leave her.’
There’s a pause. Alicia quietly wipes her eyes, and my stomach sinks further. I don’t know what to say. It suddenly seems insane to me that I would have done those things, that I would have turned my back on the sister I cared about so much.
‘I don’t know, it was shit for me, Dustin. I really needed you. I missed you. I kept thinking, what did I do wrong, for him to not care about me? To just cut me off like that.’
‘I never even thought of that, I didn’t think how you might have felt,’ I mumble.
‘I think that’s the problem, you didn’t think of me. You had Willow, and Zara, and Willow’s gran, who replaced us all. Your little life was complete. But our life wasn’t. I would be reminded of you every day, just leaving my room and walking past yours. Every day I thought of you. And all because you and Mum were both too stubborn to sort it out. And now you come back, and Mum is all “Dustin this, Dustin that”. When you were the one who left us. You were the one who broke the family.’
The Missing Pieces of Me: Discover the novel that will break your heart and mend it again Page 13