My parents had been caught in a massive pile-up on their way to Bristol, their injuries too severe to be treated. They had died at the scene.
At first, I felt numb. But when it sank in … When I realised that they would never again walk through our front door, make Sunday lunch or a cup of tea … Never again care about how much time I spent with them … I lost it.
Finn, who had been sitting stiffly beside me, came to life, clutching me to him as I screamed out my grief. He held me until dawn as I sobbed and sobbed, long after the police officers had left us, and then he called Rach and Amy.
My friends came with me to break the news to Michael. Rach had to take over when I couldn’t find the words. Then we sat and cried together, the four of us, my brother and I clutching each other as the weight of responsibility pressed heavily on my shoulders.
Mum and Dad did so much for Michael, for us both. How could I possibly step into their shoes?
My brother moved back into his old room for a few days before saying he wanted to go home, so his support worker, Carrie, stepped up her visits to accommodate him.
For almost two weeks, I haven’t gone more than a few minutes without one of my friends beside me. If it’s not Rach, it’s Amy. If it’s not Amy, it’s Finn. When Amy or Rach have slept in my bed with me, Finn has stayed on the sofa downstairs, but occasionally he has been the one to comfort me during the night when I’ve jolted awake, unable to catch my breath, weighed down with the most overwhelming sense of darkness. On those nights, he’s held me until I’ve fallen asleep again, joined up in an intimacy that feels acute.
The nightmare that has kept replaying in my mind has been the imagined moment of impact, when the old classic car my parents were driving crumpled, their simple lap belts affording nowhere near enough protection while I was blithely bringing my friends home from the festival in their BMW, equipped with all its modern safety features.
The guilt from knowing that, while I was fixating on having sex with Finn, my mum and dad were taking their last breaths on the side of a motorway makes me feel desperate.
The future appears shadowy. I have already experienced the best day of my life and I am only twenty-two. How could I ever again be as happy as I was on the day of that festival?
When I’d realised through a fog of grief that Finn should have set off for the airport hours ago, he’d shaken his head, his expression grimly determined.
‘No fucking way am I leaving,’ he’d stated adamantly.
He was supposed to record an EP with his band last week, but instead he’s here. With me. He’s postponed the recording; I heard him discussing it over the phone with one of his bandmates and I sensed they were putting pressure on him to return. His new flight is booked for early next week, three days after the funeral.
He’s helped me with everything, from paperwork and registering my parents’ deaths to organising the wake at the St Agnes Hotel. I don’t know what I would have done without him, and I keep remembering that he has experience with all this, that this must be hurting him too. He needs to get back to his life.
I just can’t bear the thought of him leaving.
The night before my parents’ funeral, we’re tangled up in bed together, my throat and eyes swollen with grief, my whole body gripped with despair.
‘I don’t know how I’m ever going to be okay again,’ I say in a choked voice.
Finn holds me against his bare chest, cocooning me in his warmth.
‘You will be. Youwillbe okay. You’ll always feel it, and the pain will always be a part of you, but you’ll learn to live with it.’
‘How?’
‘One day at a time. This first year will be really hard. But by next year, it will start to feel a bit easier, and a bit easier the year after that. It just takes time, Liv. You can’t rush it.’
‘How did you get over what happened?’ Fresh tears have broken out at his words.
‘Ihaven’tgot over it,’ he replies simply, brushing away the dampness on my cheeks. ‘I neverwillget over it. But I found a way to survive, to box it up, to compartmentalise. You’ll find a way to do that too. One night you’ll realise you’ve gone the whole day without even thinking about them.’
‘I don’twantto go a day without thinking about them!’ I say on a gasp, and then I burst into full-blown sobs and he apologises over and over, holding me tighter, pressing urgent kisses to my forehead, realising that it was too soon for me to hear something like that.
The thought that one day I might not think about Mum and Dad, that I might forget about the things we did together or the way they sounded when they laughed, the tiny freckles on Mum’s nose that only came out during the summer or the grey hairs that had just started to appear in Dad’s eyebrows – it’s too heartbreaking to bear. I’m lost all over again.
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without you,’ I blurt when I’m capable of speech.
I know immediately that I shouldn’t have said it, that it’s too much pressure to put on one person who has already done so much, but I couldn’t keep the words in.
Finn is quiet for a moment. ‘You can call me whenever you want,’ he says, rubbing my back. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be able to get back over here – money is really tight right now – but maybe you could come to LA?’
‘And leave Michael?’ I ask with astonishment, my entire body tensing, hardly able to believe that he would even suggest it.
‘He’d be all right for a bit, wouldn’t he?’
