One Summer Between Friends

by Trish Morey

  ‘Sarah?’

  She stiffened at the plaintive sound of her name being called, and turned back, searching in the shadows of the veranda until she saw her—Jules—seated in a rocking chair.

  ‘I wasn’t sure you’d come.’

  ‘I almost didn’t.’

  ‘I know.’ Jules rose from the chair then, slowly, deliberately, as if not to disturb the tension that pulled the air taut between them or, if she felt anything like Sarah, as if held hostage by it. She put something down on the table beside her. ‘Thank you for not changing your mind.’

  I still could, Sarah thought, her jaw achingly tight. She still could turn around again and walk away and leave Jules standing there.

  Except she didn’t. Her feet remained glued to the driveway, her eyes taking in the changes in the pixie-like features of her one-time friend’s face: the shadows under her eyes, the flesh of her cheeks drawn tight over her bones.

  ‘It’s been a long time,’ said Jules. ‘You look good.’

  Sarah knew her professional persona had been unravelling ever since she’d been on the island, her grooming routine relaxing, but she still looked a damn sight better—healthier—than the woman on the veranda. That knowledge didn’t prevent the lie from slipping out. ‘So do you.’

  ‘I look like crap,’ Jules said with a laugh, and the palm fronds around them rustled and swayed, as though it were her unlikely laughter that sent a breeze through the trees to dance with the loose tendrils of Sarah’s hair and tug on her heartstrings. Because for just a moment, the spell was broken and the woman standing on the veranda was Jules again, instead of that other woman.

  Sarah pressed hard against that thought. Jules was gone, along with Sarah’s husband. Along with friendship and trust and all that was good in the world.

  Jules took a deep breath. ‘Do you want to come inside, where it’s a bit warmer?’

  Sarah had been inside Jules’s cottage plenty of times before. ‘Before’ being the operative word. She looked around, testing the air. ‘It’s not cold outside.’

  The other woman nodded and Sarah was a bit miffed that she seemed so readily to understand—as if she didn’t want her inside either. ‘Come on up, then, and I’ll get us something to drink. Tea?’

  Something stronger would have far more appeal, but Sarah just nodded. Her mouth was so dry, she would have said yes to a poisoned chalice.

  Her feet came unstuck as Jules retreated inside, like the women were performing a dance, mirroring each other’s movements, three steps forward, three steps back, maintaining the distance between them. Tentatively she made her way up the steps to the veranda, leaning her hands on the railing and taking a moment in which all she could hear was the thudding of her heart. Should it be racing after such a short flight of steps, or was there something else happening? Stupid question really. How had she let herself be guilted into this? She owed Jules nothing.

  The clatter of cups signalled Jules’s return. Sarah breathed deeply, steeling herself. Jules put a tray down next to a bag on a low table. A knitting bag, Sarah realised. That was new. But then, what did she know about Jules anymore?

  ‘I heard you’re back for six months,’ Jules said, sitting down again.

  ‘That’s the plan.’

  ‘How’s your mum coping?’

  ‘She’s not the best patient. She doesn’t like doing her exercises and she’s frustrated because she’s not progressing like she thinks she should be.’

  Jules nodded and picked up the teapot. ‘Sounds like Dot.’

  Sarah was inclined to agree, but that would be to offer too much, too soon. She didn’t like that this woman knew her mother almost as well as she did. ‘She’s incapacitated and she’s worried about the shop.’

  ‘I get that.’

  Sarah sighed and looked out over the driveway, wondering if there was any point to this, or if their every future contact was going to be edged like a sharply honed blade.

  ‘Look,’ she said, not even bothering to pick up her cup. ‘Let’s cut to the chase. What is the point of this meeting? I don’t want to be here, just as much as you, no doubt, don’t want me here.’

  ‘I got diagnosed with breast cancer, Sarah.’

  ‘I heard.’

  The woman opposite blinked slowly, then said, ‘They cut it out and they think they got it all, but I still have to go back to Sydney for a course of radiotherapy.’

  Sarah wasn’t entirely sure what she was expected to say. ‘Congratulations’ hardly seemed the appropriate response under the circumstances, but if Jules was looking for sympathy, she was looking in the wrong place. So she said nothing.

  Jules waved at the air like it was in her way. ‘Anyway, it got me to thinking. About life, and stuff.’

  And karma, Sarah thought, nodding. Don’t forget karma.

  ‘And that’s why I wanted to see you.’ She paused, her blue eyes searching out Sarah’s brown ones, holding them, not letting them get away. ‘I wanted to say sorry. In person.’

  The air around them seemed to shimmer into stillness, as if holding its breath. Waiting.

  ‘What?’

  The muscles bracketing Jules’s mouth pulled tight. ‘I said I’m sorry, for everything that happened.’

  ‘Sorry? Are you kidding me? You slept with my husband. You got pregnant to him. You had his baby and you took him from me—’ her voice was rising, becoming more shrill, ‘—and you have the nerve to tell me you’re sorry? Like that makes it all okay? Well, I’ve got news for you—it doesn’t!’

  Jules reeled back in her chair as though she’d received a body blow. ‘I didn’t mean to get pregnant. If it’s any consolation. It was an accident.’

  Sarah’s cry came unheralded, a keening wail of devastation that lifted the lid on the pain of five failed IVF attempts and one even more soul-wrenching miscarriage.

  Jules ventured a hand across the space between them. ‘Sarah—’

  ‘No!’ she yelled, pulling away. ‘Don’t you dare touch me! Do you know how hard I tried to get pregnant? How many injections I had to endure? How many invasive procedures? And every time, to hold onto the tiniest thread of hope that this time it might work—that this time would be the one.

  ‘And you—you have the gall to tell me that you didn’t mean to get pregnant? That it was an accident? You think that might be some kind of comfort? That it might somehow help? Nothing can make up for the hurt you caused.’ Sarah put her hands over her mouth and shook her head, tears stinging her eyes. She turned away, looking out over the balcony into the gardens, looking anywhere to get that woman out of her line of sight. If she didn’t get out of here now, it was going to get ugly. ‘I have to go.’

  Sarah made a move towards the steps, but Jules was already there barring the way, her features confused.

  ‘But you knew this. I told you.’

  ‘What? When?’

  ‘I wrote to you. I wanted to talk to you at Richard’s memorial service but you left early.’

  Oh, Sarah thought, that letter. ‘I—burned it.’

  Jules looked stricken. ‘Look, Sarah, I’ve handled this badly, I know—’

  ‘I really have to go.’

  Rain was starting to fall. Fat drops that splattered on the palms and ricocheted in a dozen different directions, slowly first and then faster, but any concerns about getting wet were no match for her need to get away.

  ‘You think you’re so perfect!’ she heard through the din of rain hitting the metal roof. ‘You think you’re the only one hurting here? The only one who matters?’

  Sarah didn’t turn around, just kept walking, uncaring of the rain pelting down on her.

  ‘I didn’t seduce him, you know,’ Jules said. ‘If that’s what you’re thinking.’

  Sarah closed her eyes, her steps faltering, and this time she did spin around. ‘Do you really think it matters who seduced who? What matters is that I trusted Richard. I trusted you. You were the one I turned to when I felt heartsick. When I’d just had
a failed IVF attempt and Floss declared she was having another baby. You were the only one I could tell. You were the one I cried my heart out to.’ Her voice cracked and she had to drag in air to recharge her lungs.

  ‘You knew what having a baby meant to me. You, more than anyone! And yet you not only slept with my husband, you gave him a child—the child I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried. So do you really think it matters how it happened?’ Her head fell sideways, rain soaking into her collar, trickling down her neck in slithering snakes of cold, but she couldn’t care less. ‘My god, Jules. No. Because it did happen. You slept with my husband. How could you do that to me?’

  ‘I didn’t want a baby,’ Jules cried through the rain. ‘I never wanted a baby and I would have done anything not to have had it so you would never know. But Richard said no. Richard wanted it.’

  Richard wanted it. Finally, something that made sense. Something she could believe. Of course he would. He’d wanted a child from the outset—but his child, it had to be his child. Adoption would be to admit failure. So he’d been her biggest cheer squad and said when it came to the cost of treatments that money was no object. But it didn’t change the fact that it was one of her best friends who’d given him what he’d craved. It didn’t change the fact that he’d wanted to go ahead with a pregnancy that he knew would be her undoing, and that Jules had gone along with him.

  It was all too much. ‘You know what I don’t understand? What bothers me more than anything? You didn’t even like Richard,’ she said. ‘He didn’t like you.’

  The other woman shook her head. ‘Do you think he liked you, at the end? Do you think he liked the person you’d become? He felt trapped, Sarah. Helpless.’

  The words lashed at her, more stinging than the rain, piercing her skin, digging their way into her soul. ‘You’re lying! You’re just trying to make yourself feel better, to justify what you did to me!’

  ‘Am I? I’m sorry I asked you here today. It was a mistake.’

  ‘Yeah. It was.’ She spun on her heel, marching blindly down the driveway. The squall disappeared as suddenly as it had hit, but it didn’t matter, she was already drenched. She rounded the bend in the driveway to see a woman carrying an umbrella coming the other way, a child skipping alongside her.

  The woman stopped dead, her hand tightly clasped around the little girl’s. The little girl had two fingers in her mouth, a teddy wedged under her arm—and Richard’s eyes.

  Air punched from Sarah’s lungs.

  ‘Hello, Sarah,’ said Pru Callahan, sounding hesitant, her eyes anxious. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Pru,’ she managed, without taking her eyes from the child. The child had curly hair and her mother’s heart-shaped face but Sarah kept coming back to Richard’s damned eyes. She hadn’t got close enough to either Jules or the baby at the memorial service to notice details, but there they were now, looking up at her in total innocence. But if she’d ever had a glimmer of a hope that Richard hadn’t been the father, simply a convenient place for Jules to hang paternity from, that hope died a rapid death.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, suspecting she must look half demented, yet somehow managing to dredge up a smile. ‘My name’s Sarah. What’s yours?’

  The fingers came out of the girl’s mouth, but moved no further than her chin. ‘Della.’ The fingers went right back in.

  ‘That’s a pretty name.’

  The girl regarded her seriously before pulling her fingers out again. ‘You’re all wet.’

  ‘I know. I got rained on.’

  ‘You need a ’bwella.’

  Cute. So damned cute that the loss of what she’d never have surged over Sarah in a tidal wave of pain. But Sarah wouldn’t give in to it. She simply nodded, raised her eyes to Pru’s concerned face, and said goodbye.

  The rain had stirred the forest floor, infusing the air with the rich scent of nature, and Sarah breathed it in, willing it to calm her as she walked the narrow road. No other place on earth had air like this, she knew, that seductive blend of sea and salt and lush vegetation. Life-giving air. Fertile air.

  For some.

  She sniffed, swiping her nose with the back of her hand, and thought of the day Richard had come home from his stint in Lord Howe in a weird mood. Sarah had considered it understandable; she herself was still battling to come to terms with their loss. They were like orbiting planets, avoiding each other’s gravitational pull. But she needed him if they were going to get back on the IVF treadmill and try again. Yet when she’d tried to reach out, he pulled away. Nothing was wrong, he told her every time, but there were moments when she saw him watching her, an unfathomable expression on his face, looking like he was about to say something. ‘What?’ she’d said, more than once, but he’d closed his mouth and shaken his head, as if he’d thought better of it.

  And then, four weeks later, like someone or something had flicked a switch, everything had changed. He’d come home from the gym, his movements feverish, an excitement she hadn’t seen for a long time lighting his eyes. He’d pulled open the fridge door, seized the milk and guzzled it straight from the bottle. And she’d laughed, because it was such an unusual sight, but more so because it was good to see him happy. He’d suggested dinner out that night, their favourite restaurant, champagne, and she’d thought that things had turned a corner and would be better from now on. He’d drunk too much red and she’d driven home and he’d made love to her—or tried to—and then he’d cried in her arms and told her he was sorry. She’d thought he was apologising for being a lousy lay, but their night together had been enough to convince her it was time to try again.

  So the very next day she’d called the clinic and made an appointment to come in. Having been so close last time, they’d be crazy to give up.

  And when she’d told him the exciting news, he’d looked at her aghast. ‘I can’t go through this anymore,’ he’d said. ‘I want a divorce.’

  She’d thought then that things couldn’t get any worse. She’d pleaded with him. He was tired of the effort, emotionally exhausted, just like she was—it was understandable. But it would get better—it would change—a baby would fix everything.

  And when she’d refused to believe that he’d meant what he’d said, Richard had dropped the bombshell that had blown her world apart. He hadn’t just stayed at Jules’s place on his trip to Lord Howe—he’d slept with her best friend. Now Jules was pregnant with his child. And he was leaving Sarah to be with her.

  In that moment, and all the moments that followed, Sarah’s future had stretched out in front of her, a long and bleak ribbon of emptiness.

  28

  ‘Who was that lady, Mummy?’ asked Della.

  ‘An old friend of your mother’s,’ said Pru, looking concerned as she undid the snaps on Della’s raincoat.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jules, because that was less confusing than telling her daughter that it had been Della’s dead father’s wife. There are some things a child her age didn’t need to know.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Pru asked, when Della had run off into the kitchen for a biscuit.

  Jules pushed herself away from the veranda railing. ‘I guess I had that coming.’

  ‘She wasn’t very receptive?’

  ‘Oh, she listened. And then I suppose you could say she had a few things to get off her own chest.’

  ‘Oh, Jules. But at least you did the right thing. You reached out.’

  ‘Yeah, but I didn’t do the right thing, did I? That’s what the problem is.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ Pru said, ‘what’s done is done. You can’t change it. So what can she possibly expect from you now? Blood?’

  Jules nodded. ‘I imagine that’s exactly what she’d like.’

  ‘You did the right thing, and I know it can’t have been easy.

  Now you have to forget about Sarah and concentrate on you, and on making a full recovery.’

  Jules turned away. She’d tried. What more could she do?

  29
>
  Sarah changed out of her wet clothes and dried her hair before she went back into the store. Deirdre was happy to see her and soon bustled off to help Tammy with her kids while Sarah returned to oiling the shelves. She tried hard to imagine Dot being so keen to help Sarah out if she’d ever managed to have kids, but drew a blank. Her mother might like to imagine herself as a martyr, but she wasn’t the type to actually muck in. Dot was more the type who liked to stand back, organise and criticise, and she would have found plenty to criticise in Sarah’s mothering skills. Maybe it was just as well she’d never had kids.

  Her arm stopped. Her breath hitched. Had she really just thought that?

  Bloody hell, that was a turn-up. The run-in with Jules must really have affected her. Unless it was the island. Or maybe it was just being with her mother that made her glad she didn’t have yet another reason for Dot to find fault with her.

  Yeah, that was probably it.

  ‘Did you have a nice visit with Jules?’ Dot asked when Sarah had shut up shop and let herself into the house. She finished off the gravy beef she’d prepared that morning, mashed some potatoes and served it all with green veg.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  Not in Sarah’s book. The shame was that she’d wasted her time. When had saying sorry ever really changed anything? It wasn’t like you could rip out the pages from the book of the past. And when Sarah had refused to give her the absolution she was so clearly seeking, Jules had struck back in a way she’d known would hurt. Talk about picking the scab off a wound. Sarah had been stinging ever since.

  ‘Because I know Richard was hoping you two could be friends.’

  Some connection in Sarah’s brain shorted. Her right eye twitched. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not nice to say what,’ said Dot. ‘Richard hoped one day you two could be friends again. Well, all of you, really—Floss as well. You all used to be such good friends.’

  ‘How would you know what Richard hoped?’

  ‘Because he told us,’ said her mother, sounding exasperated that Sarah had to ask. ‘Right here at this dinner table. Didn’t he, Samuel? He said that he was sorry for what happened, but what else could he do?’