“He told me you were too young. Said to try again when you turned eighteen. So I did, but he insisted you were busy with exams, and after that, university. He always claimed it wasn’t the right time. Once you’d graduated I tried again, but he told me the two of you had sat down and talked. That you’d said you weren’t interested. That you never wanted to see me.”
I gape. “And you took his word for it?”
“He made me afraid I’d ruin your life, Joel. He told me you were sensitive, that I’d unsettle you, cause big problems. I’m sorry—I guess he wasjust trying to protect you.” Warren swallows. “But, look, a few years later, I... had a dream. About today.”
“What sort of dream?”
We stop still and face each other. Warren says nothing, just eyeballs me until I know for sure.
I feel a strange, animalistic urge to howl. With what—relief? Joy? Frustration? “You have it too. You have ittoo.”
He takes my arm. “It’s okay.”
“You’ve been waiting for me? You knew I was coming today?”
His skin flares amber in the sunset. “Yes.”
It’s hereditary.
I turn away from him, hold my face against the wind. The salt invades my nostrils, stiffens my hair as I try to take everything in.
It’s a few moments before I feel steady enough to walk on. “How long?” I’m unable to digest yet what he’s told me about Dad.
“Since I was a kid.”
“And you haven’t found a cure.”
Warren hesitates before relating his own dispiriting journey. Drugs and heavy drinking in his youth, then a slightly more orthodox approach than mine—multiple GPs and counselors. Hypnotherapy, acupuncture, medication. But we both came up against the same brick wall in the end.
He has his own sodding notebook too. Black and hard-backed, just like mine.
“Do you sleep?” I ask.
“Rarely.”
“Have you got a girlfriend? A wife?”
“Too complicated.” He bolts me a look. “And you?”
I laugh, loosely. “Why do you think I’m here?”
“Don’t tell me you’re a lifelong bachelor too.”
I think of Callie and my dream. And then my heart cleaves in two all over again. “I tried to be. I wasn’t strong enough. I caved.”
Because he has only half the story, he treats this as good news. “You have no idea how happy that makes me.”
•••
Later, he offers me a bed for the night. But it feels too soon. I need space to shelter from the blizzard of thoughts in my mind, so he rings round for vacancies at local B-and-Bs.
While he’s on the phone, I notice a framed photograph hanging in his hallway. A surfer, wet-haired in a rash vest with a Hawaiian lei around his neck. He’s being lifted above the heads of a crowd. At first I think it’s Warren, then peer a little closer. It’s been signed in gold pen. I can just make out the name.Joel Jeffries.
So maybe Mum named me after Warren’s favorite surfer. A way to remember him, perhaps.
•••
I’m pretty tired the next morning after less than four hours’ sleep. And I don’t envisage the net-curtained confines of the B-and-B’s dining room doing much to pick me up. So instead I go back to Warren’s, with strong coffee and egg rolls from a local café.
