I don’t know if natural mothers really exist, but, if they do, Debbie must rank among their best. From the moment we met, she loved me honestly and wholeheartedly, no caveats. I love to watch her with Josh – their shared jokes and easy laughter, how frequently they fold into hugs, murmured terms of endearment. The way she lights up when we walk through the door. I watch it all, greedy for detail, hoping to absorb Debbie’s blueprint of mothering, so I can do it the way she does, one day.
In the sugar-soft light of her kitchen, across the scuffed pine of the dining table, she takes my hand. Her brown eyes latch to mine, wide and fearful in a way I have never seen them. ‘I’m scared, Rachel.’
Unease eddies inside me. Pete’s anniversary is always hard. But it doesn’t usually feel like this. As if she’s begging me for help.
Her grip on me tightens. ‘I can’t lose him. I wouldn’t survive it. He’s all I have in the world.’
It takes me a moment to grasp that she is talking about Josh. And, when I do, I realise the words do not exist to reassure her. Because how can I say,Don’t worry, you have me?As if that would ever come close to compensating for having lost her husband, and then her only child.
‘Does he ever talk about it? With you?’
‘Sometimes. He tries not to worry me.’
How much detail do I offer up? Do I tell her about the panic attacks, Josh’s middle-of-the-night terrors that have now morphed into a fear of falling asleep? Do I admit that, sometimes, I turn to look at him on the sofa and see his jaw muscle flickering, because he’s trying not to cry? Do I reveal that he has made a will, paid into life insurance, stopped making any plans at all beyond June next year?
He has been quieter than usual the past couple of days, seeming distracted, permanently deep in thought. But this isn’t unusual as his dad’s anniversary nears. A combination of grief, and fear that he will succumb to the same fate, one day.
‘Is he scared?’ Debbie asks, dabbing at her eyes with a paper napkin. Her hand is warm around mine.
I nod, softly.
‘Pete was terrified. He tried to hide it, but how could he not be? When you know that to be your destiny... your whole life.’
Josh has told me that losing his father felt like an earthquake. The aftershocks never stopped. Debbie took a few weeks’ leave from her job as a radiologist, which stretched into an indefinite career hiatus. Josh said she lost all her appetites – for food, fun, the future. Everything that made her who she was, obliterated by a seismic loss.
Tonight is the first time Debbie and I have ever talked like this, just the two of us.
I can relate to her terror. If ever I allow my mind to stray to the prospect of Josh dying... But then I’ll always force myself to pick up the phone to Ingrid, or my dad, or any of the people who love me. And they will instantly reiterate that Josh’s terrible family history is coincidence, nothing more.
When it comes to Josh himself, though, I have found it is a fine line between reassuring him, and invalidating his fear.
‘Rachel?’ Debbie says.
‘Yes.’ I pull my cardigan a little closer around me. It’s warm in Debbie’s kitchen, at her table by the battered old red AGA. But my skin has gone stiff with goosebumps.
‘Do you ever think perhaps you should start a family before...?’
She trails off, but the missing words are easy to place.Before it’s too late.
7.
Rachel
December 1988
A few weeks after the common room party, I found myself in A&E. I was sitting in the waiting room with one eye squeezed shut, trying to focus on anything but the sensation of having had iron filings sprinkled liberally across my left cornea.
After I’d been there a good while, a figure appeared in what remained of my peripheral vision. With some effort, I looked up. And even through just one tear-filled eye, I knew it was – impossibly – him.
Josh had said he’d ring me, as the party wrapped up. So I’d spent the following few days thinking he might call, or maybe come to see me at halls. But then the days turned into weeks. I hadn’t wanted to ask Ingrid, not keen to appear needy. So I’d resolved to move on.
And yet. The memory of that dynamite kiss kept tugging me back to him. I couldn’t stop replaying our colliding smiles, the flame of his gaze. The magnet of his body pressed to mine. Surely I hadn’t imagined it, that forcefield between us?
I was immediately conscious of my mismatched tracksuit and unwashed face. In contrast, Josh wore dishevelment perfectly, endearingly scruffy in loose jeans and a soft woollen sweater, his disordered hair framing those dancing eyes.
Given several weeks had elapsed since our kiss, I felt cautious. Then again, he hardly seemed to be trying to escape me.
‘What happened?’ he asked, his face etched with concern as he sat down next to me.
