SWNOVELS : Part 2 – Chapter 38
Iwatched a group of kids playing volleyball while I waited for Eddie. I wondered if he would even turn up, and wondered if it would be easier, better, if he didn’t.
The tide was far out, the beach quiet. A light carpet of cloud hovered between Santa Monica and the fierce sun. The air smelled of something fuggy and sweet—melting sugar, perhaps, or cooking doughnuts—a childhood smell; it lit up an old corner of memory. Long holidays in Devon. Scratchy sand, salty limbs, slippery rocks. The delicate patter of rain on our tent. Whispering late into the night with my little sister, whose presence in my life I had never then thought to question.
I checked my watch.
Over on the volleyball court, the kids finished their game and started packing up. The boardwalk rumbled as a lone Rollerblader panted past. I ran damp fingers through my hair. Swallowed, yawned, clenched and unclenched my fists.
Eddie’s voice, when it came, was from somewhere behind me. “Sarah?”
I paused before turning to face him, this man who had lived in my head so many years.
But when I did look at him, I saw only Eddie David. And I felt only the things I’d felt before I’d realized who he was: the love, the longing, the hunger. The whump! as my body ignited like a boiler.
“Hello,” I said.
Eddie didn’t reply. He looked me straight in the eye, and I remembered the day I met him. How I’d thought to myself that his eyes were the color of foreign oceans: full of warmth and good intentions. Today they were cold, almost blank.
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “Thanks for coming.”
A tiny twitch of his shoulders. “I’ve been trying to come and talk to you for the last two weeks. Been staying with my mate Nathan. But I . . .” He trailed off, shrugged.
“Of course. I understand.”
A family on yellow rented bikes pedaled along the boardwalk between us and he stepped back, watching me.
We walked down the beach and sat on the sand where it sloped to the water. For a long time we watched the Pacific crashing in on itself; sheets of silver foam on a relentless journey to nowhere. Eddie had his arms looped around his knees. He took off one of his flip-flops and splayed his toes in the sand.
The shock of longing almost winded me.
“I don’t know how to do this, Sarah,” he said eventually. His eyes were glassy. “I don’t know what to say. You . . .” He spread his hands wide, looked helpless.
Once upon a time Eddie had a sister, a sweet girl called Alex. She had blond, tangly hair. She sang a lot. She had large blue eyes, full of life and plans, and she loved fruity sweets. She had been my sister’s best friend.
My stomach clenched as I held her in my mind’s eye, waiting for what I knew was coming.
“You killed my sister,” Eddie said. He took in a sharp breath and I closed my eyes.
Last time I had heard those words, it had been through the big Panasonic answering machine next to Mum and Dad’s phone. It was one, maybe two weeks after the accident and Hannah had finally been discharged from hospital. She had refused to get into the car with me; refused even to go home. There had been a scene, and eventually a patient transport bus had been found to take her and Mum home, while Dad and I drove.
When we got in, there had been a red flashing light—a sight I’d grown to dread—and a message from Alex’s mother, who by then was in a psychiatric hospital. Her voice had been like smashed porcelain. Your daughter won’t get away with this. She can’t. Sarah killed my baby. She killed my Alex, and she’s going to prison, I’ll make sure of it. She doesn’t deserve to be free. She doesn’t get to be free when Alex is . . . is . . .
She’s going to make sure you go to prison, Hannah had echoed, scowling tearfully at me. Cuts and bruises were flung like pebbledash across her body. You killed my best friend. You don’t deserve to be here if she isn’t. She started to cry. I hate you, Sarah. I hate you! And that had been the last thing she had ever said to me. Nineteen years had passed; nineteen years, six weeks, two days, and she hadn’t spoken a single word to me, no matter how hard I’d tried, no matter how many interventions our parents had staged.
“I’m so sorry, Eddie,” I whispered. I rubbed my ankles with shaking hands. “If it helps in any way, I have never forgiven myself. Hannah never forgave me either.”
“Oh yes, Hannah.” He looked at me, then immediately away, as if I disgusted him. “You told me you lost your sister.”
“Well . . . I did.” I traced a wobbly line through the sand. “Hannah stopped speaking to me. She cut me out of her life, permanently. So I don’t feel like I have a sister. Not really.”
He looked briefly at the line I’d drawn in the sand. “Hannah never spoke to you again?”
“Never. And God knows, I’ve tried.”
He went silent for a while. “I can’t say I’m as surprised as I should be. She’s stayed in regular touch with my mother. You can imagine the conversations.” His voice was flinty. “But that’s by the by. The fact remains, you have a sister. Even if she wants nothing to do with you, you have a sister.”
I paused. Wished I could bolt. I am the woman he can hardly look in the eye. I am the woman he probably wished dead all these years.
“I am so sorry your sister was best friends with mine, Eddie. I’m so sorry I took them out of the house that day. I’m so sorry my reactions weren’t the right ones when he . . . when that man . . .” I took a swallow. “I can’t believe you’re Alex’s brother.”
Eddie flinched. Then: “I want you to tell me everything,” he said, and I heard the effort it was taking to keep his voice neutral.
“I . . . Are you sure?”
His body—his strong, warm, lovely body, of which I’d dreamed so many times, gave a sort of twist of assent.
So I did.
I tried so hard to keep my place in Mandy and Claire’s friendship group that summer—so miserably, exhaustingly hard. In the weeks following our GCSE exams they met up every day, but they invited me to join them only a handful of times. “God, Sarah, stop reading into it,” Mandy said, when I found the courage to confront her.
We were teenage girls. Of course I read into it.
During their time in each other’s pockets they’d developed a new code of behavior they were unwilling to share with me, so my first few weeks in year twelve were a minefield. I said the wrong things, talked about the wrong people, and wore the wrong clothes, realizing only when I caught the edge of an eye roll that they’d moved on.
On the day of my seventeenth birthday I came into school and found that they’d stopped sitting in our corner of the sixth-form common room and had moved somewhere else. I had no idea if I was invited.
During the spring term Mandy started going out with someone from Stroud, the town where we went to school. Greggsy, his name was. He was twenty, and therefore a catch: no matter that he had a nasty, weasellike face, or a questionable relationship with the law. Claire was sick with envy and spent all her time trailing around after them. I began to lose hope, certain that this would be the final straw for me. Girls who went out with older men were of a higher caliber. They were sexual, successful, self-contained; untouched by the pimpled anxieties of the sixth form.
Mandy might take Claire before she pulled up the ladder behind her, I thought, but she certainly wouldn’t take me.
But one day in March Mandy said quite casually that Bradley Stewart had been asking about me. Bradley Stewart was Greggsy’s cousin. He drove an Astra. He was one of the best-looking boys in that nasty group, and I was pathetically pleased.
“Oh?” I said, not looking up from the Diet Coke label I was peeling. It was important I played this right: Mandy would use my words to shame me at a later date, if I seemed too keen. “I suppose he’s all right.”
“I’ll hook you up,” she announced breezily. Claire, with whom Mandy had fallen out earlier, was fuming, and I realized this opportunity would never have presented itself if they hadn’t fought.
We didn’t go on a date, because nobody went on dates back then. We just met up on the pedestrian street outside the Pelican, with all the other teenage drinkers. We drank bottles of Hooch and Smirnoff Ice, and tried to be sharp and funny. Bradley, with his black hair and black trainers and his piercing eyes, somehow persuaded me off to the multistory car park on the London Road “for a drink.” He steered me into a wall and started kissing me. He put his hands up my top, and I let him, even though he was rough and impatient. He put his hands down my jeans, and I let him. I didn’t want to, but I had had almost no experience with boys and a chance like this wasn’t going to come my way anytime soon. He tried to have sex with me; I said no. He asked for a blow job, settling eventually for a nervous hand job. I didn’t enjoy it, but he did, and that was enough for me.
Then he didn’t call, and I was crushed. I stared at Mum and Dad’s phone for days, eventually giving in and trying his number when I couldn’t bear it any longer. Nobody answered. I even got the bus to his house, near Stroud. I walked past his front door three times in thirty minutes, rain soaked, hopeful, and hopeless.
“You should have slept with him,” Mandy advised. “He thought you must be seeing someone else. That or you’re frigid.”
Claire, back in favor, laughed.
I could feel it slipping away already, that tiny flash of value I’d held since Bradley had taken me off to the Brunel multistory. So I told Mandy to tell him I was ready to put out (her words) and he called me.
We became a couple, of sorts. I convinced myself that it was love and never imagined that I might deserve better. Nor would I have wanted someone better: I was part of a gang now; I belonged everywhere. I existed on that higher platform with Mandy and there was no way I was going back down.
Bradley often told me about other girls who fancied him and my teenage heart would freeze with terror. He went days without calling me, never walked me to the bus stop, and often insisted on going without me to the Maltings, a nasty meat market of a club, so that he could “be himself.” More than once he decided this while we were in the queue, knowing I had nowhere to stay if I couldn’t stay at his. The day I passed my driving test, he failed even to congratulate me. He merely suggested I drive over to his house for sex.
“Sounds like a top bloke,” Eddie said.
I shrugged.
He looked at me briefly, and I was reminded of our first morning together, when we’d sat facing each other across his breakfast bar. Me, him; the smell of bread and hope. Then he looked away, as if he couldn’t bear to look at me. “Do you mind if we just get to the point?” he asked quietly. “I understand why you’re telling me this stuff, but I—I just need to know.”
“I’m sorry. Of course.” I grappled with rising chords of panic. It was years since I’d talked out loud about what had happened that day. “I . . . Why don’t we go for a walk? It’s getting too hot to sit still.”
After a moment Eddie got up.
We walked up past a pastel-blue lifeguard’s hut and onto the boardwalk, which snaked south all the way to Venice. Bikes and Rollerbladers whisked past us; gulls cartwheeled above. The morning’s brief cloud cover had been burned away and the air now shimmered with heat.
It was summer, a Monday afternoon in June. Mum and Dad had gone to Cheltenham for something and had left me in charge of Hannah after school. Hannah had Alex over. After an hour pretending to do their homework, they’d told me they were so bored they might seriously die and instructed me to drive them to Stroud for a Burger Star. I’d said no. Eventually we’d compromised with a hanging-out-eating-sweets session on Broad Ride. They’d made a den up there a few years ago, when building and maintaining a den was still an acceptable way to spend a day. Now, long past that sort of thing, they liked to go up there to listen to music and read magazines.
I was sitting on a rug a little distance from them, reading one of my A-level texts. I had no interest in their whispered conversation about some boy in their class, but they were twelve years old and I wasn’t letting them out of my sight. Hannah was too much of a show-off to be responsible for her own safety. She didn’t understand the slimness of life; the consequences of a twelve-year-old’s bravado.
It was a warm day, the sky carrying thin twists of cloud, and I felt about as peaceful as I was capable of feeling back then. Until I heard the sound of a car, thumping and buzzing with overamplified music. I looked up and my heart lifted and sank. Bradley had called earlier, wanting me to drive over to pick him up. His car wouldn’t start, he’d said, could I come and get him? Maybe lend him some money to fix it?
No, I’d said to both. I was looking after two twelve-year-old girls; plus he already owed me seventy pounds. “Borrowed Greggsy’s new car,” he said now, ambling toward me with a rare smile. “Seeing as you were too lame to help me out.” He looked at Hannah and Alex with interest. “All right, girls?”
“Hi,” they said, goggling at him.
“Since when did Greggsy drive a car like that?” I asked. It was a BMW. Souped up, just how Bradley and Greggsy liked their cars, but a Beamer all the same.
“He came into a bit of money.” Bradley tapped his nose.
Hannah looked excited. “Did it fall off the back of a lorry?”
Bradley laughed. “No, mate. It’s legit.”
He couldn’t sit still for very long. After about ten minutes on the blanket he suggested we go “for a race” in our cars.
“No way,” I said. “Not with the girls.” I’d been in a race with him once before: Bradley versus Greggsy back and forth on the Ebley bypass late at night. It had been the most frightening twenty minutes of my life. When it had come to an end, in the new Sainsbury’s car park, my head had flopped down onto my chest and I had cried. They’d laughed at me. Mandy, too, even though she’d been just as scared.
Hannah and Alex, however, teetering on the wobbly diving board into adolescence, thought it was a great idea. “Yeah, let’s go for a race,” they said, as if it were a little sports car Dad had lent me, not a banger with a one-liter engine and a head gasket whose days were numbered.
They went on and on, Hannah and Alex, Bradley riding on their coattails. It’s not the M-fucking-five, Sare. It’s just a shit little road going nowhere. Alex kept flicking her blond hair over her shoulder and Hannah copied her, only she was less convincing.
My need to protect Hannah had not dwindled as the years had passed. If anything, it had strengthened as she’d transitioned from fearless child to swaggering girl. So I refused. Again and again. Bradley got more irritable; I got more stressed. Neither of us was used to me saying no.
But then the matter was taken out of my hands. Hannah, giggling, ran over to Bradley’s passenger door and got inside. Bradley ran round to the driver’s seat, quick as a wink. I started shouting at them, but nobody heard me because the car Bradley had borrowed had a dual exhaust and he was roaring the engine. He shot off toward Frampton and my stomach spilled out through my legs.
“Hannah!” I shouted. I ran toward my own car, Alex behind me.
“Shit!” she breathed. She sounded impressed and frightened. “They’ve gone!”
I made her do up her seat belt. I told her she shouldn’t be swearing. I prayed.
“And off we went,” I said, coming to a halt on the boardwalk.
Eddie turned away from me and stared out to sea, hands jammed in his pockets.
“You were on the village green because you’d just been walking along Broad Ride,” I said. “Weren’t you? The day we met. You were there for exactly the same reason as me.”
He nodded.
“It was the first time I’d been up there on the anniversary of her death.” His voice was tight, bound securely to prevent collapse. “Normally I’d spend it with Mum, who’d just go through old photo albums and cry. But that day I just . . . I just couldn’t do it. I wanted to be out there, in the sunshine, thinking good things about my little sister.”
Me. I’d done this. Me and my weakness, my monstrous stupidity.
“I walk along there every year on June second,” I told him. I wanted to fold myself around him, absorb his pain somehow. “I go there, rather than up to the main road, because Broad Ride was their kingdom that afternoon. They had nail varnish and magazines and not a care in the world. That’s the bit I fly back to remember.”
Eddie looked briefly at me. “What magazines? Do you remember? What nail varnish? What were they eating?”
“It was Mizz,” I said quietly. Of course I remembered. That day had been playing out in my head my entire adult life. “They’d borrowed my nail varnish. I’d got it free with a magazine; it was called Sugar Bliss. We had Linda McCartney sausage rolls, because they were both having a vegetarian phase. Cheese-and-onion crisps and a tub of fruit salad. Only Alex had smuggled in some sweets.”
I remembered it as if it were yesterday; the wasps hovering over the fruit, Hannah’s new sunglasses, the swaying shades of green.
“Skittles,” Eddie said. “I bet she brought Skittles. They were her favorite.”
“That’s right.” I couldn’t look at him. “Skittles.”
I caught up with them at the main road. Bradley was trying to turn right, toward Stroud, but a succession of cars stuck behind a tractor had held him up.
Stay calm, I told myself, as I got out of the car and jogged up to his passenger door. Just get her out and treat this all as a joke. He’ll be okay if—
Bradley spotted me and quickly turned left instead, engine roaring. I ran back to my car.
“You can speed up if you want,” Alex said. Already Bradley’s car was nearly out of sight. “You can floor it. I don’t mind.”
“No. He’ll slow down and wait for me so he can race me. I know what he’s like.” Blood pounded in my ears. Please, God, let nothing happen to her. Let nothing happen to my little sister. I looked at my speedometer. Fifty-five miles per hour. I slowed down. Then I sped up. I couldn’t stand it.
Alex turned on my stereo. It was a group of American kids, Hanson, singing a silly earworm song called “MMMBop.” Nineteen years on I still couldn’t bear to hear it.
After a horrifyingly short time, Bradley was racing back toward us on the other side of the road at sixty, maybe seventy miles per hour. “Slow down!” I yelled, flashing him. He must have U-turned in the road up ahead.
“Chill!” Alex said. She flicked her hair nervously. “Hannah’s fine!”
Bradley shot past, beeping, and then screeched the car round onto our side of the road. “Handbrake turn,” Alex marveled. I came almost to a stop, watching them in my rearview mirror. I barely breathed until they had straightened out and were driving behind us again. I could see her there, in his front seat, a whole head shorter than him. A little girl, for Christ’s sake.
She stared straight ahead. Hannah was only that still when she was afraid.
“How do you know what a handbrake turn is?” I heard myself ask. I was driving slowly, my hazard lights on. Please stop. Give me my sister back. I wound down the window and pointed frantically toward the verge.
“My brother told me,” Alex said. “He’s at university.”
For a moment I felt angry that her brother—some idiot—thought it was clever to teach his little sister about handbrake turns. But then Bradley dipped back so he could roar up behind us, screeching on his brakes at the last minute. I gasped. He did it again. And again, and again. I tried several times to stop, but each time I did, he tried to overtake me. So I continued driving, just like he wanted me to. I couldn’t let him fire off ahead with my sister again.
He carried on like that until we started to approach the dip in the road, not far from the Sapperton junction and the woods. But by then he must have become bored, because he didn’t stop when he revved up into the back of my car; he hit it. Gently, but still hard enough to make me panic. I’d only had a license three weeks.
“Shit,” Alex said, only more quietly than before. She was still trying to look excited, but it was obvious she was afraid. Her slender fingers were closed tight around the old gray webbing of the seat belt.
We descended into the dip, Bradley flashing and beeping on my tail. He was laughing. And then—even though we were heading down into a blind bend—he pulled out to overtake.
Everything seemed to hang like a droplet on a tap, ready to fall and smash.
A car came round the bend on the other side, just as I knew it would.
Bradley was nearly level with me. There was no way they could avoid crashing.
My sister. Hannah.
My emergency-response system took over at that point, I told the police afterward. I knew that because what happened next was not a matter of choice; it was simply what happened. My brain instructed my arms to swerve the car left, and the car swerved left.
If you lose control of your car, never aim for a tree, Dad had told me when he taught me to drive. Always aim for a wall or a fence. They’ll give way. A tree won’t.
And the tree did not give way, when the passenger side of the car—the side containing sweet little Alex Wallace with her blond flicky hair and her Skittles and her blobby nail varnish—slammed into it.
The tree didn’t give way, but Alex did.
I forced myself to look at Eddie, but he was still facing away from me, looking out to sea. The shining globe of a tear tracked slowly down his face and he brushed it away, pinching the top of his nose. But after a few seconds he let his hand fall, and with it tears. He stood and cried, this big, kind man, and I felt it more strongly than I had done in years. That loathing of myself, that desperation to do something, change things, and the subsequent despair that I could not. Time had marched on, leaving Alex behind. Leaving Eddie in small pieces, my sister unable to forgive me.
“I spent years wondering what I’d do if I met you,” Eddie said eventually. He wiped at his eyes with his forearms, turned to face me. “I hated you. I couldn’t believe that scumbag went to jail and you didn’t.”
I nodded, because I hated myself, too.
“I asked why they weren’t punishing me,” I said uselessly. “But they kept on saying I didn’t do anything illegal. I wasn’t driving recklessly.’
“I remember. Our family liaison officer had to explain it to us.” Eddie’s voice was flat. “It made no sense to my mother.”
I closed my eyes, because I knew what he was going to say next.
“All I know is that you chose to save your sister, and because of that, mine died.”
I wrapped my arms around myself. “That wasn’t the choice I made,” I whispered. Tears blocked my airways. “That was not the conscious choice that I made, Eddie.”
He sighed. “Maybe not. But it’s what happened.”
The police came to the hospital. The BMW had been stolen, they said.
Why had I accepted what he’d told me? Why had I ever listened to anything he had said? A sick panic washed over me at the thought of all I’d given this man. My virginity. My heart. My self-respect. And now the life of a young girl. My sister’s best friend.
A witness had seen the driver running across fields, away from the accident. Who was he?
“Who was he?” Dad repeated, confused. He was sitting by my bed, holding my hand. Mum was on the other side, a human shield between the police and her daughter. “Who was he, Sarah?”
“My boyfriend. Bradley.”
“Your what?” Dad was even more perplexed. “You had a boyfriend? But how long for? Why didn’t you tell us?”
And I turned my head and cried into the pillow, because it was so obvious now. So obvious that Bradley was a vile human being—had always been a vile human being—and so obvious that, deep down, under those tightly folded layers of adolescent insecurity, I’d known.
My actions might have saved my little sister from death, but they failed to protect her from harm. Bradley had swerved into the space I’d created, ramming Hannah’s side of the stolen car into the back of mine. Hannah had two surgeries in two days. She was in the ward on the floor above mine, concussed, badly injured, and for the first time in her twelve years, silent.
Bradley, whose name I gave to the police, was nowhere to be found. “Try Greggsy’s,” I told them, and he was arrested soon after.
After I was discharged, I sat by Hannah’s bed every day for two weeks until she was free to go. I didn’t go to school; I barely went home. I remembered almost nothing, other than the quiet beep of machines and the hum of a busy pediatrics ward. The fear when one of Hannah’s machines made a strange noise; the guilt like a blowtorch to my chest. Mostly she slept; sometimes she cried and told me she hated me.
The police insisted there were no charges to bring against me, no matter how determined Alex’s family was to see me punished. The guilt grew stronger. I testified against Bradley at Gloucester Crown Court and was reprimanded because I begged the judge to try me, too.
I didn’t know Alex’s family. Mum and Dad had almost always ferried her to and from playdates at our house because—as Mum put it—“Alex’s mother struggles sometimes.” She had since had a full mental breakdown, they said in court. Not only that but she had been single since Alex was young, so her son had had to drop out of university to look after her. Neither of them made it to court.
Someone in the jury looked at me then. A woman, probably Mum’s age, who could imagine what it must be like to lose a child. She looked straight at me and her face said, That’s your fault, too, you little bitch. That’s your fault, too.
Carole Wallace managed to call us three times before the psychiatric nurses realized she wasn’t calling her son and revoked her telephone access. I was a murderer, she said, once to Dad, twice to our answerphone. Our neighbors stopped inviting Mum and Dad round for dinner, or talking when they came past. They didn’t blame me, I don’t think; they simply had no idea what to say to any of us. “Sometimes the elephant is just too big for the room,” Dad said.
Hannah refused to sit at a table with me. People stared at my parents in the supermarket. Alex’s photo continued to appear in the local press. I went back to school, but within hours I knew I was finished there. People were whispering. Claire said I should have been done for manslaughter. Mandy was not talking to me at all, because I’d sent the police after Greggsy’s cousin. Even some of the teachers couldn’t quite look me in the eye.
That night Mum and Dad sat me down and told me they were putting the house on the market. How would I feel about moving to Leicestershire? Mum had grown up in Leicestershire. “We could all do with a fresh start, couldn’t we?” she asked. Her face was translucent with worry and exhaustion. “I’m sure we’d be able to find somewhere for you to carry on your A levels.”
Mum was a teacher. She knew that was impossible. It was only then that I realized quite how desperate she was.
I went upstairs and called Tommy, and flew to LA the very next day.
I went so that Alex’s family could grieve in peace, without the risk of ever having to run into me. I went so that my parents wouldn’t have to move halfway across the country, so they’d have a chance at starting over without the titanic shadow of their daughter looming over everything. I went to find sanctuary in a place where nobody would know what I’d done, where I wouldn’t be “that girl.”
But most of all I went to LA to become the sort of woman I wished I had been the day I’d met Bradley. Strong, sure of myself, afraid of nobody. Never, ever, ever afraid to say no.
Eddie and I were drawing close to Venice now, the boardwalk snaking past shops and stalls peddling cheap gifts and henna tattoos. Music boomed out of a speaker somewhere; homeless people slept under palm trees. I gave a few dollars to a man with a rucksack full of patches. Eddie watched me with a blank face. “I need to sit down,” he said. “I need to eat something.”
We sat outside a bar, where we were the focus of a madwoman with a parrot and a roaming accordionist. Eddie had no answers to the madwoman’s questions and just gazed blankly at the busker as he swayed around us.
“I can take you to Abbot Kinney, if you like,” I said. “It’s another street, nearby. More upmarket if this is too crazy for you.”
Reuben loved Abbot Kinney.
“No, thanks,” Eddie said. For a moment he looked like he might smile. “Since when was I upmarket?”
I shrugged, suddenly embarrassed. “I never really got to find out.”
He glanced sideways at me and I saw what might be a pocket of warmth. “I think we got a pretty good measure of each other.”
I love you, I thought. I love you, Eddie, and I don’t know what to do.
His muffin arrived. I imagined my life, stretching out ahead of me without Eddie David, and felt light-headed with panic. And then I imagined him, all those years ago, envisaging a life stretching out ahead of him without his sister.
He ate his muffin in silence.
“My charity,” I said eventually. “My charity was set up for Alex.”
“I did wonder.”
“For Alex and for Hannah.” I picked at a hangnail. “Hannah has kids of her own now. I’ve seen pictures. I sent them presents every birthday at first, but in the end she sent a message through Mum asking me to stop. It kills Mum and Dad. They tried everything to bring us back together. They just thought she’d climb down, eventually. Perhaps she would have done, if I was still in England . . . I don’t know. She was such a stubborn child. I guess that’s the sort of adult she became, too.”
Eddie looked down the beach. “You shouldn’t underestimate the impact that my mother will have had on her. She never stopped hating you. At times it’s the only thing that’s got her through.”
I tried not to imagine Eddie’s mother’s house, the walls holding old anger like nicotine stains. I tried not to imagine my sister there with Carole Wallace; the words they’d use; the tea they’d drink. Although, oddly, there was comfort to be found in that picture, too. In the possibility that my sister’s wholesale rejection of me could perhaps have been helped along by someone else.
“Do you think that’s partly why?” I asked, turning back to him. My desperation was palpable. “Do you think your mum might have been egging her on, all these years?”
Eddie shrugged. “I don’t know your sister very well. But I know my mother. I’d probably have reacted differently to you if I hadn’t been listening to Mum for nineteen years.”
He looked as if he might say something else, but then closed his mouth.
“I’ve struggled to be anywhere near children since it happened,” I said. “I refused childminding jobs, wouldn’t babysit, went on ward visits with Reuben only when there was no other option.”
I paused. “I even refused to have a baby with him. He made me go to therapy, but nothing would change my mind. When I saw a child—any child—I saw your sister. So I steer clear. It’s easier that way.”
Eddie ate the final piece of his muffin and rested his forehead in his hand. He said, “I wish you’d used your family name when we met. I wish you’d said, ‘I’m Sarah Harrington.’”
I yanked the hangnail off, leaving a soft strip of stinging pink. “I’m not reverting to Harrington, not even after the divorce. I don’t want to be Sarah Harrington ever again.”
Eddie was squashing the final crumbs from his plate onto a finger. “It would have saved us a lot of heartache.”
I nodded.
“And your parents were meant to have moved to Leicester. There was a SOLD sign at the end of their track for weeks.”
“I know. But I moved to LA, and I was the problem. Their buyer fell through and they decided to stay. I think by then it was pretty clear I wasn’t coming back.”
A long silence fell.
“Could I ask why you call yourself Eddie David?” I asked, when it became unbearable. “Surely your name’s Eddie Wallace?”
“David’s my middle name. I started using it after the accident. For a while everyone recognized my name and there’d be all this . . . I don’t know . . . kind of suffocating sympathy, I suppose, when people realized who I was. It was easier to be Eddie David. Nobody knew him. Just like nobody knew Sarah Mackey.”
After a while he turned to look at me, but his gaze was pulled away again, like water running back to the sea. “I’d give anything to have worked out who you were before it was too late,” he said. “I just—I just can’t believe we never made the connection.” He scratched his head. “You know they let him out after five years?”
I nodded. “He moved to Portsmouth, I heard.”
Eddie said nothing.
“It was my Facebook, wasn’t it?” I said. “You saw a post from Tommy. He called me Harrington.”
“I saw it about twenty seconds after you left. And for the first minute or so, before the shock set in properly, I just thought, No. Pretend you haven’t seen that. Make it go away, because I can’t not be with her. It’s only been a week, but she’s . . .” He flushed. “She’s everything,” he finished off. “That’s what I was thinking.”
We sat in silence for a long time. My heart was racing. Eddie’s cheeks were faintly red.
Then he told me about his mother, about her depression, how it had exploded after Alex’s death and deteriorated into a complex mental health cocktail from which she had never really emerged. He told me she had moved to Sapperton when she’d come out of the worst of the breakdown, because she wanted to be “closer” to her dead daughter. Recognizing that she was too vulnerable to survive alone, Eddie had abandoned any hopes of returning to university and moved in with her for a while. He persuaded Frank, the sheep farmer, to rent him a crumbling cow barn on the edge of Siccaridge Wood, which he slowly turned into a workshop and then, once she was able to live on her own, a home of his own.
“Dad funded it,” he said. “Cash was his solution to everything, after he left us. He couldn’t bring himself to call, once Alex’s funeral was over, or to come and visit, but he was fine sending money. So I decided to be fine about spending it.”
He told me about the day he’d discovered who I was. How the trees outside his barn had seemed to collapse in on him as he reframed me as Sarah Harrington, the girl who’d killed his sister. How he’d canceled his holiday to Spain. Put his commissions on hold. How he’d gone to check on his mother one day and found her zonked out on medication, and the guilt he had felt as he had watched her sleep.
“It would be catastrophic if she found out about me and you,” he said quietly. “Although it felt pretty catastrophic even without her knowing. I fell into quite a hole. I didn’t look at Facebook, or e-mails, or anything. Just kind of cut myself off. Took a lot of walks. Did a lot of thinking and talking to myself.”
He cracked his knuckles. “Until my mate Alan turned up to check if I was dead, and told me you’d been in touch.”
Then he sighed. “I should have replied to you,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t. You were right—that’s no way to treat anyone. I started to write to you, again and again, but I just didn’t trust myself to talk to you.”
I tried not to imagine what he might have said.
“But I loved your life story. Your messages. I craved them when they didn’t come. I read them over and over.”
I swallowed, trying not to attach meaning to this. “Did you ever call me?” I asked tentatively.
He shook his head.
“Are you sure? I had . . . I had some dropped calls. And, well, a message, telling me to stay away from you.”
He looked puzzled. “Oh. You wrote to me about that, didn’t you? In one of those letters? I’m sorry—I didn’t really pay it much attention. I think I just assumed you’d made it up.”
I winced.
“Did you hear from them again?”
“No. But I did think . . . Look, I did wonder if it might be your mother. Is there any way she could have found out about you and me? I saw a woman, on the canal path between my parents’ house and your barn . . . And when I went to Tommy’s sports thing at my old school, I saw someone wearing the same coat. I mean, I can’t be certain it was the same person, but I’m pretty sure it was. She wasn’t doing anything particularly strange, but both times I felt like I was being, well, stared at. And maybe in a hostile way.”
Eddie folded his arms. “That’s very odd,” he said slowly. “But there’s absolutely no way it was Mum. She hasn’t the faintest clue about you. And anyway, she . . .” He trailed off. “She’s just not capable of that sort of thing. Crank calling, following people—that’s just way beyond her capabilities. She’d get superstressed even thinking about doing something like that. In fact, she’d fall apart.”
“And there’s nobody else it could have been?”
Eddie looked utterly confused. “No,” he said, and I believed him. “The only person I told was my best mate, Alan, and his wife, Gia. Oh, and Martin from football, because he also saw your post on my Facebook page. But all of them I told in confidence.”
He leaned forward, his face knotted with concentration. He must have failed to get anywhere, though, because after a few minutes he shrugged and straightened up. “I really don’t know,” he said. “But it wasn’t Mum. Of that you can be certain.”
“Okay.” I slid off a flip-flop and tucked one foot up on my chair. Eddie was looking miserable again. He pressed a finger down onto the rim of his plate so it reared up like a flying saucer. He wheeled it left and right.
“Why are you here, Eddie?” I asked, eventually. “Why did you come?”
He looked at me then. Looked at me fully, and my stomach pulled up into my throat.
“I came because you messaged me saying you were going back to LA and I panicked. I was still angry, but I just couldn’t let you walk out of my life. Not until I’d spoken to you. Heard what you had to say. I knew Mum’s view couldn’t be the only view.”
“I see.”
“I booked a flight and e-mailed my mate Nathan to ask if I could crash at his place. Called my aunt and asked her to come and stay with Mum. It was like watching myself in the third person, really. I knew I shouldn’t come, but I couldn’t stop myself. And I couldn’t stop you, either: you were already on the plane when you e-mailed me.”
But when he got here, he found himself paralyzed. Three times he came to confront me; three times guilt over his sister sent him running back into the obscurity of the city. I slumped in my chair. Even talking to me felt like a betrayal.
“Why didn’t you tell me about your past?” he asked, when I signaled for the bill. “You told me so much about yourself. Why didn’t you ever mention what happened?”
I pulled some cash out of my wallet. “I just don’t tell people, full stop. The last person I told was my friend Jenni, and that was seventeen years ago. If we . . . Had we . . .” I cleared my throat. “If we had turned into a Thing, I would have told you. I nearly did, in fact, on the last night. But other things got in the way.”
Eddie looked thoughtful. “Whereas I’m used to telling people. I often have to, because of Mum being so up and down. But that week with you just felt so different to anything else. I wasn’t Eddie, Carole’s son, the bloke who lost his sister and has to spend far too much time running around after his mum. I was me.” He slid his phone back in his pocket. “For the first time in years, I didn’t think about the past. At all. Plus Mum had her sister with her, because I was about to go off to Spain, so I didn’t even need to think about her.”
He stood up, giving me an odd smile. “Which is ironic, really, given who I was with.”
I left a couple of dollars on the table and we walked down to the water’s edge. Wavelets furled silkily around our feet, drawing back into the boundless blue swell of the Pacific. The horizon boiled and shimmered, indistinct.
I slipped my hand into my pocket. Mouse. I ran a thumb over her, one final time, before offering her over to Eddie on the palm of my hand.
He stared at her for a long time. “I made her for Alex,” he said. “For her second birthday. Mouse was the first decent thing I made out of wood.”
With tenderness, he picked her up, holding her in front of his face, as if learning her shape once again. I imagined him chiseling away at this tiny lump of wood, maybe in his father’s garage, or simply at a kitchen table, and my heart broke. A round-faced little boy making a toy mouse for his baby sister.
“Alex thought Mouse was a hedgehog, when she was a toddler. Only she couldn’t say “hedgehog” back then, it came out as ‘Ej-oj.’ Made me laugh. I started calling her Hedgehog; it never quite wore off.” He fitted her back onto his key ring and put it back in his pocket.
I had run out of delaying tactics. The sea shifted in and out. Neither of us said anything.
We watched herring gulls and sandpipers circling above a family picnic, and a wave tumbled in on us, faster than we could move back. His shorts got wet. My skirt got wet. We laughed, he lost his footing and nearly fell, and for a second I could smell him: his skin, his clean hair, his Eddie smell.
“I’m going to fly back tomorrow,” he said, eventually. “I’m glad we’ve had this conversation, but I’m not sure there’s anything else we can say. Or do, for that matter.”
No, I thought hopelessly. No! You can’t walk away from us! It’s here! Our thing! It’s right here in the air between us!
But nothing came out of my mouth, because it wasn’t my decision to make. I had driven a car carrying Alex into a tree and she had died, right there beside me. Time would not change that. Nothing would change that.
He picked up my hands and uncurled my clenched fists. My nails left sad white crescents in my palms. “We could never go back to what we had the first time round,” he said, smoothing his thumb across the nail marks, like a father rubbing a child’s cut knee. “It’s done. You do understand that, Sarah, don’t you?”
I nodded and made a face that suggested agreement, or perhaps resignation. He dropped my hands and looked off at the sea for a while. Then, without any warning at all, he bent down and kissed me.
It took me a while to believe it was happening. That his face was pressed against mine, his mouth, his warmth, his breath, just like I’d imagined a hundred times over. For a few seconds I was perfectly still. But then I started kissing him back, elated, and he wrapped his arms tightly around me, like he had the first time. He kissed me harder, and I kissed him back, and the wheeling gulls and shrieking children were gone.
But as I began to let go completely, he stopped, resting his chin on my head. I could hear his breath, fast and unsteady.
Then: “Good-bye, Sarah,” he said. “Take good care of yourself.”
His arms released me and he was gone.
I watched him walk away, my hands dangling by my sides. Farther and farther away he walked. Farther and farther away.
It wasn’t until he was back up on the boardwalk that I said out loud the thing I’d been unable to say before now, not even to myself.
“I’m pregnant, Eddie,” I said, and my words were carried away by the wind, just like I wanted them to be.