She’d forgotten to call her last night to apologize. She was a horrible, horrible friend!
Anna was usually a very careful driver, so much so that Spencer had taken to calling her ‘Grandma’ when she’d got behind the wheel, but she swerved onto the hard shoulder and brought the car to a stop. Thiswasan emergency. Her handbag was on the passenger seat, and she delved into it with her left hand and started rummaging around. It was only when her fingers reached the lining at the bottom that she realized her mistake.
Her phone was still sitting in the bottom of the wardrobe, where she’d thrown it after the call. As bad as she felt about Gabi, there was nothing she could do about it now. It would have to wait until she got home later that afternoon.
Anna squinted at the road ahead, indicated and pulled back into the traffic. The voice – his voice – replayed itself inside her head as she did so.
I beg your pardon?
Just what Spencer would have said, but it hadn’t been filled with barely contained laughter or the husky softness she would have expected. He’d sounded so serious, so sad. As if he’d been aching every bit as badly as she had at their separation.
That made sense, in a weird way. But also, it didn’t. Why, if she’d invented it, hadn’t she imagined Spencer’s usual cheeky tone? That was what she’d been yearning to hear, after all, his verySpencerness,captured in an inflexion, a nuance, to hear the smile in his words.Why had she made him sound so mournful?
Spencer would have laughed at her for letting her imagination run away with her, but was it really so ridiculous? They’d always said their love was special. Once, when they’d been at a dinner party and one of his friends had said he’d want his wife to move on and marry again if something happened to him, Spencer had quipped that he wasn’t that generous, that he’d find a way to come back because Anna was his and always would be his. What if he’d found a way to do that? No onereallyknew what happened after you’d died, did they? It was the one area where science could never prod its curious fingers. What if something beautiful, somethingimpossible,had occurred?
No, she told herself.Just no.
It couldn’t be true. Because what was she going to do if it was? March into her in-laws’ house for lunch and calmly announce that she’d had a chat with their dearly departed son the night before? It sounded ridiculous. Itwasridiculous.
Okay, good. Anna released a shaky breath. Putting it in context like that helped. So what if it hadn’t all been a dream? That didn’t mean all of it had been real, either. It was probably a mixture of reality, imagination and emotion – that was what she was going to tell herself if she started freaking out about it again. And she would keep telling herself that all the way through lunch that afternoon.
Chapter Five
WHAT I COULD really do with, more than anything else,Anna thought, as she arrived at Spencer’s parents’ house and killed the engine,is a hug, plain and simple.She wished she were pulling up to her own parents’ house, that it was her mother who would dry her hands on a tea towel and come running to the front door to greet her, but that wasn’t possible. Not unless she wanted to jump on a plane and travel almost three thousand miles.
Her parents had moved to Canada not long after she and Spencer had married. Anna’s mother worked as a conference centre manager for an international chain of hotels, and the kind of position she’d been working towards her whole career had come up. The only snag? It was in Nova Scotia. Anna’s father had just retired from being a civil engineer, and their only child was settled, so they had taken the leap. The plan was to move back to the UK when her mum retired. Anna visited, of course, and they had Skype calls regularly, but it wasn’t quite the same. You couldn’t hug a screen.
Anna ran from her car and rang the Barrys’ front doorbell. Quarter past one. She’d never been this late before.
Gayle answered. She smiled at Anna, but there was a stiffness in her posture as she leaned in and kissed her briefly on the cheek.No hug was forthcoming. ‘You’re running a bit late,’ she said, taking in Anna’s woolly jumper and jeans, which were definitely not as smart as her usual family lunch attire, but Anna had barely had time to find anything clean, let alone iron anything.
‘Um… yes. Traffic was a bit bad.’ She nodded towards the rain, still falling in large, icy drops beyond the overhang of the porch.
‘Well, we managed to hold off a bit,’ Gayle said, opening the door wide. ‘But you’re here in the nick of time – we were just about to sit down.’ And she led the way through the house to the large dining room that overlooked the garden.
Spencer’s older brother, Scott, was already there, helping to carry covered dishes in from the kitchen. Anna always felt a little jab in her ribs every time she saw him. He looked so much like his younger sibling. Both boys had inherited their mother’s fair hair and blue eyes, although Spencer had always looked the more boyish. Scott’s features were sharper, his expression naturally more sombre.
He and his wife had announced just before Christmas that she was expecting their first child at the end of May. Teresa gave Anna a little nod as she arrived from the kitchen, carrying a dish full of stuffing balls. Anna couldn’t help looking at her stomach, trying to work out if there were the beginnings of a bump there under her loose top. While she was overjoyed for the couple, she felt a little flush of envy every time she thought about it.
She tried to help but was shooed away, so she slid into her normally assigned seat at the bottom of the table. Spencer’s dad,Richard, winked at Anna, making her feel slightly less as if she had her tail between her legs for being late. Spencer had taken after his father, a man who had, apparently, been telling ‘dad jokes’ well before he’d actually become a dad. Anna gave him a conspiratorial smile back and felt her shoulder muscles unclench.
When lunch was over, they retired to the living room. This was Anna’s favourite part of the afternoon. The tradition had started right after Spencer had died. To while away the hours doing something other than drinking endless cups of tea, they’d looked through the photo albums together, trying to pick a few for the upcoming funeral.
It hadn’t been an easy job to narrow it down to just a couple. With his mischievous blue eyes and boyish grin, Spencer had been very photogenic. And even after the funeral, they’d kept going with it. It had been comforting to see him smiling back from the pages at them, just beingSpencer.It still was.
Gayle went to the special shelf on the bookcase that contained the large albums, all arranged in date order, and pulled one from the left-hand end.
Toddler pics? Again?It seemed an awfully long time since they’d looked at anything from the other end of the shelf, from any of the albums Anna might have a chance of featuring in, and she really could do with seeing some solid evidence of her time together with Spencer today, because everything seemed to be upside-down and back-to-front. An anchor of some sort might have been helpful.
She nodded along as usual anyway as Gayle leafed through the album, making the appropriate noises at the right times, and it wasn’t hard to do because shedidlove seeing all these favourite pictures of her husband – the one of him on top of a lion in Trafalgar Square,or the one of him with the snowman he’d built in the back garden.
Anna looked over at her mother-in-law, with her perfectly coiffed, Mary Berry-style hairdo, her erect posture and precise movements. Her fierce loyalty and protectiveness towards her family were truly admirable, but they came with a downside. Gayle was the sort of mother who believed no woman was good enough for her baby boys, and it had taken a while for Anna not to feel like an outsider at family gatherings.
But after Spencer had died, that had changed. Gayle had clung to her, opened her arms and welcomed Anna into the family in a way she never had before. They were united in their loss, their grief. She’dneededAnna. Both Scott and Richard didn’t do emotion, one buttoning down hard, the other finding safety in humour when things got too much, so Anna had been the one person Gayle had been able to talk to. They’d cried and laughed and remembered together.
Anna’s parents had come to stay as soon as they could after Spencer had died. They’d even offered to move back to England permanently, but Anna had refused, telling them they couldn’t put their lives on hold indefinitely for her. However, once they’d actually left, she’d realized how much it had helped having someone else in the house. She knew one or both of them would have dropped everything again if she’d told them she was feeling lonely, but that wouldn’t have been fair on them. So having this new, closer connection with Gayle had meant everything.
Once the photo albums were put away, a conversation began about how they’d all spent New Year’s Eve, but nobody lingered on their tales,because it was glaringly obvious that someone was missing from all of them. To make up for that, Scott relayed a story about the millennium New Year when they’d had a big reunion with Gayle’s side of the family. Anna had heard the anecdote countless times before, but it still made her smile. Fifteen-year-old Spencer had crept out of a long and boring dinner and lit £500-worth of fireworks meant for midnight while the rest of the family were still enjoying their desserts. He was lucky he hadn’t blown himself to kingdom come.
