“You’re not going to start talking about surfing being the source, are you?”
He laughs. “Ha. I might.”
“But are you really happy?” I press him. “You’re not—”
“With anyone?” He leans back in his chair. “There’s more than one way to be happy in this life, Joel.”
I smile too. I have to. Because, despite everything, it feels so good just to talk with someone who really understands. To actually know, for thefirst time in my life, that I’m not alone in this. “Do you know what, Warren? I think you might be a bit of a hippie.”
“Is that a compliment?”
I raise my eyebrows, swipe the last nacho for myself. “I haven’t decided yet.”
•••
After four nights in Cornwall I drive home. In the early hours I stop at a service station, drink coffee in their weird little amphitheater-café. Try to rest my eyes before making the final push back to Eversford.
At a nearby table, a woman’s comforting a baby. Her partner’s next to her, scarfing a doughnut as he blinks into UV-grade lighting. But it’s the woman I’m most interested in. Her eyes are shut and, though she’s trying to rock her baby to sleep in a service station at two a.m., she looks pretty happy. Calm and content, like she’s listening to a harpist or getting a massage.
She reminds me of Callie. Same heart-shaped face, same long dark hair. Same profile when she turns her head. The similarity’s so striking, I can’t stop staring (until her partner starts to look as though he might get up and make me, which is both reasonable and my cue to leave).
I swing onto the M4 again, begin the last leg back to Eversford. But Callie’s double with the child in her arms keeps tweaking the sleeve of my consciousness. And before long a thought corkscrews through me: if this condition is hereditary, then, for me, kids can never be an option. Despite that beautiful fleeting moment a few months ago, when I pictured Callie pregnant... I couldn’t inflict the way I live on an innocent soul.
But where does that leave Callie? Though she’s never said as much, I’m pretty sure she wants children. Or, at least, she’s never given me reason to think she doesn’t. Her parents have dropped a few hints about it. Plus she has that rare and natural gift with kids that makes them cling to her legs, cry when she leaves. I picture her playing with my nieces and nephew. Teaching a floorful of under-tens to twist at Hugo’s wedding. She wasthinking about working in child care, for God’s sake. And if a family is something she wants, I can’t be the one who stands in her way.
Adoption? For some reason I can picture my sister suggesting it, worried as always I’m denying myself life’s joys. But adoption doesn’t feel like something I’d want to explore. Because I’d still be the same: fixating on my dreams, worrying about Callie. And even without having passed on my condition, I’d mess the kid up somehow, I’m sure. Hand down my neuroses, infect them with anxiety.
I imagine the years rolling by, Callie and I stagnating as I count grimly down to her death. In those early days of agony with Mum, when I knew about the cancer before she did, all I could think about was how things would be four years down the line. Life lost its color, turned gradually grayer. How can I go through that again, and still make Callie happy? It’s not possible. It’s just not.
I remember what she said to me as we drove home on Boxing Day last year. About seeing my dreams as a gift. And I feel a fresh onrush of sorrow, because I know now that to me they will always be a curse.
•••
It’s nearly four when I get in. I can’t bring myself to wake her, so I stay in the living room with Murphy.
Sitting down on the sofa, I Google Joel Jeffries. He’s British, same age as Warren. But, unlike Warren, Joel’s a champion surfer with the lifestyle to match. House on the beach, wife, kids, crew. My instinct is to feel sad on Warren’s behalf, before I think back to what he said at the beach bar yesterday.
There’s more than one way to be happy in this life.
65.
Callie
I wake at about six thirty, just as light is starting to leak through the blinds. Something tells me Joel is home, so I pull on the tractor T-shirt he gave me at Christmas and pad through to the living room.
I find him on the sofa. He’s slung his head back against the cushions and is staring at the ceiling, completely still.
“Hello,” I whisper, sitting down next to him and taking his hand. “What are you doing in here?”
The look on his face is enough to break me. “Sorry. Didn’t want to wake you.”
“How was Cornwall?” I reach down to ruffle the dog’s ears. “We missed you.”
“I missed you too.”
Our eyes meet as, close to the open window, a bird performs a solo.
“Name that bird,” Joel murmurs.
