‘Yes, she does, she stinks.’
‘I’ve come straight from work, it’s probably the smell of the hospital.’ Eve forced another smile, trying to remind herself just how triggering those kinds of smells must be for Max. She’d changed her clothes, but maybe the smell of antiseptic was clinging to her skin and her hair. He’d spent far too long inhospital in the weeks after the assault and then there was the fact that the person he’d been, the trainee surgeon who’d lived for his career, would never go back to a hospital in that capacity again. No wonder he resented any reminder.
‘Well, I don’t want to smell it.’ Max folded his arms across his chest, suddenly going from sounding like a stroppy teenager to looking like a toddler.
‘Let’s go outside, shall we? Spring is definitely on the way and it’s lovely out there.’ Annie was doing her best to smooth over the situation, as she always did. Desperately trying to pretend everything would all be okay if they could just get through all of this. She seemed determined not to accept that ‘all of this’ was the new normal and there was no getting through it. At least not to the place where they’d come from.
‘Okay, but the wind better not blow the smell in my direction.’ Max stalked out of the door before either of them could answer, and as Eve exchanged a look with his mother, Annie just shrugged.
‘Just give it a bit more time,’ she said, the way she had so often before and Eve wanted to ask how much time would be enough for her to give, because she knew forever wouldn’t be long enough and just lately even one more day felt like more than she could bear.
2
Felix closed the door behind him and let out a long breath. He’d known how lucky he was to find this place, one of six purpose-built apartments, or ‘flats’ as his sister insisted on calling them; teasing him as she always did for becoming so Americanised during his time in San Francisco. Whatever Eden wanted to call it, his new home was just what he’d hoped for when moving back to the UK. The big windows meant that it was full of light, even on the dullest of days, and Felix had a good-sized balcony with a view of the sea. There was even a shared garden, which had a gate on one side leading to a footpath that went all the way to the beach. He’d wanted a dog for as long as he could remember, but his apartment in San Francisco hadn’t been pet friendly in the slightest and then there’d been Meredith. He’d wondered for a while if getting a dog might help, give her something to focus on other than the demons that had so often felt as if they were on the verge of overwhelming her. The way things had become, in the end, he couldn’t have trusted her to look after herself – let alone a dog – she might even have sold it when he was at work one day. Anything was possible when she needed to score her next hit.
Now he could get a dog if he wanted one and come home from work knowing that it had been looked after by whatever doggy-daycare service he booked it into. There were no more calls from Meredith at all hours of the day and night, telling him she was in trouble and needed his help. The only person he had to look after was himself and it was a huge relief not to be responsible for anyone or anything else. It was weird, though, the way the human psyche worked, because he also felt strangely bereft, as though something was missing. He didn’t want to go back to that life, but the void that trying to help Meredith had left behind was what had led him to volunteer for Domusamare, a local charity. It had been set up initially to try to combat homelessness, but now the charity also supported addicts, recovering addicts and victims of domestic abuse. His first day volunteering there had taken him back to some of his darkest days in San Francisco, trying to help fentanyl addicts, most of whom had long ago lost the desire to try and help themselves. A colleague at the hospital where he’d worked in San Francisco had asked if he would help out and, as an occupational therapist, he’d truly believed he had some skills that could be useful to people whose long-term use of the drug had resulted in a huge physical toll on their bodies, as well as their minds.
The clinic Felix volunteered at, By the Bay Recovery, was where he had met Meredith. A former addict herself, but five years clean, she’d retrained as a therapist to help others as a way of giving back to those who had saved her. It had been incredibly easy to fall in love with her and he had barely given her past a thought when their relationship had moved from friendship to something he’d hope would last forever. Felix had always known that alcoholics and drug addicts were in recovery for life, but at first he’d felt sure that Meredith had banished her demons. He could never have guessed the day he met her, or in the months that followed as their relationship deepened, that she wasconstantly teetering frighteningly close to a relapse. Meredith seemed to have it all together and she ran five miles every day, saying it kept her mind and body in the kind of condition she owed them, after all the abuse she’d put them through. It wasn’t just a routine, it was essential to her wellbeing and, looking back, maybe that had also been an addiction of sorts. Felix just didn’t realise because all he could see was the woman he loved. He’d felt guilty ever since for not seeing the signs in her when he should have been able to. Growing up with an alcoholic mother who hadn’t managed to break the cycle until he was an adult, Felix knew that sobriety often balanced on a knife edge. His mother had tried numerous times in the past and had ‘fallen off the wagon’, and even when she did manage to quit drinking there was always a fear in the back of his mind that at any moment she could start again. All of that made it even harder to forgive himself for not truly considering that possibility when it came to the woman he’d shared his life and home with.
Meredith was almost the quintessential Californian girl when it came to her appearance, long blonde hair, bluey grey eyes that looked like they’d been colour matched to the water in San Francisco Bay and a broad, bright smile that made it look for all the world as though she’d never encountered a major problem in her life. And the truth was, by some standards, she hadn’t. Instead Meredith had a pre-disposition to poor mental health, where even minor knocks and blows could feel catastrophic and leave her desperate to numb her resulting anxiety. It had started off with alcohol when she was still at school and progressed through an addiction to prescriptions painkillers after a minor accident, and eventually on to Class A drugs, until she was no longer functioning at all. That seemed to be far behind her by the time they met, but then she’d lost a client she’d grown close to, and all the years of therapy and studying, and helping others overcome their own demons, just melted away. Meredith hadspiralled back into addiction in a way that had been terrifyingly quick and nothing that Felix had tried had been able to pull her out again. She’d left the home they shared, telling him he didn’t understand her and that he never would because he hadn’t had to fight his own addiction.
He’d been desperate to get Meredith the support she needed to get well again. At first, she’d rung him at all hours of the day and night asking for help, mainly in the form of money she claimed she needed for food, but they both knew she didn’t care whether she ate or not. All she cared about was the next hit. Then she disappeared altogether. Someone had told Felix they’d heard she’d gone back into rehab, but she’d stopped calling him, or even picking up when he tried to get hold of her and he’d discovered that she’d racked up thousands of dollars’ worth of debt on credit cards she’d taken out in his name. Felix had done everything he could to track her down, working with her family to try and save the woman they all loved, and in the end, it had pushed him to the edge of his own limits and he’d been forced to make the decision to leave San Francisco, to give himself some peace of mind.
His friend, Karl, still worked at the clinic, and Felix had asked him to keep trying to find Meredith and to let him know if she turned up, because if there was anything he could do to help her, he wouldn’t hesitate. The love he’d felt for Meredith was still there, but it had morphed from romantic love to a kind of compassionate sorrow. He really hoped she was getting the help she needed and that this time it might actually work, but coming home to Cornwall had saved him from living half a life, constantly on edge. He’d taken a job as an occupational therapist at St Piran’s Hospital. It was a world away from his life in California and, even though addiction problems existed everywhere, the rugged beauty of the coastline in the area wherehe’d grown up, had soothed his soul from the moment he got back.
Most of his patients were rehabilitating from injuries, or strokes, and he felt as though he could really help them make meaningful steps towards recovery, or at least find new ways to function that would improve their quality of life. Yet as the weeks ticked by, the void had opened up inside him and the desire to do more to help people like Meredith had grown with it. She haunted his dreams and when Drew, his sister’s boyfriend, had told him about his own volunteering at Domusamare, it had felt like the outlet he needed. That had proved to be true, but he’d almost forgotten there’d be days like this. Days when it hit home that sometimes there was nothing that could be done to change the outcome everyone was working so desperately hard to try and avoid. Days when he’d be reminded so sharply of Meredith that it would feel almost impossible to breathe.
Knock… Knock-knock-knock… Knock. It was almost like Morse code, the way his sister knocked on the door, announcing who it was without her having to say a word. It was a code they’d come up with as kids, when their rooms had been their sanctuaries and they didn’t want to let anyone in, except one another. Their mother had been in the grip of alcoholism back them, but their father had made his own mistakes, enabling his wife and trying to cover up what was going on. Even when Felix had told his dad that he and Eden felt unsafe when their mother was on one of her drunken rampages, he hadn’t forced her to get help. Instead of making his wife face the consequences of her actions, he’d fitted locks to both of his children’s bedroom doors, so that they could ‘feel safe’ by locking their mother out. That wasn’tthe way to make children feel safe, but it had at least provided a physical barrier to keep both of their parents away from them. They started using their keys to lock the doors when they went out, too, after their mother had got horribly drunk one day and ripped all the posters off Eden’s walls and torn them to shreds in a fit of rage.
The locks allowed them to ignore the knocking and the ranting of their mother when her demands to be let in went unanswered. Instead they’d stay silent and hope she might believe they’d gone out. It was why Eden had come up with their ‘secret’ knock, the code that meant they’d know who was at the door. It was silly all these years down the line, with their mother and father both completely transformed from the people they’d been, but the ‘secret’ knock endured all the same.
Felix opened the door a few inches. ‘I don’t interact with cold callers.’ His attempt at keeping his tone serious and his expression neutral failed almost instantly, and he laughed as she rolled her eyes.
‘You’ve got three freezing callers out here, never mind cold ones, so just let us in, will you?’
‘You should have said Teddie was here.’ His heart instantly lifted at the sight of his four-year-old nephew in the arms of Eden’s partner, Drew. When Teddie reached out towards Felix, everything in the world was good again. Eden’s little boy had been diagnosed with autism and, until very recently, had been completely non-verbal. Now he was beginning to say things, but the development of his speech was quite different to that of most children, who would learn individual words and eventually begin to string them together. Teddie had what was called Gestalt language processing and as soon as he started to speak it was in phrases, rather than individual words. The phrases had a unique meaning to Teddie and weren’t always easily decipherable to those who didn’t know him. One of the earliestexamples, had been when he’d memorised the phrase ‘we all fall down’ from the ‘Ring-A-Ring-A-Roses’ nursery rhyme. Now, every time Teddie hurt himself, whether it involved falling over or not, he’d say ‘we all fall down.’ The speech and language therapist had told Eden that the phrases were stepping stones to the development of more fluid speech, where the set phrases would eventually progress to single words, but she’d been so delighted for him to say anything at all that she wouldn’t have minded what his first words had been.
‘Twinkle, twinkle.’ Teddie repeated the phrase with the same rhythm it had in the nursery rhyme, but Felix knew exactly what his nephew wanted and it wasn’t a singalong.
‘Okay, sweetheart. Let’s get inside and I’ll get your toy box out for you.’ Lifting Teddie into his arms, Felix carried him through to the large open plan living area, one corner of which had been given over to sensory equipment for his nephew. There was a big wooden toy box containing all the toys that Felix had bought for him, the most recent additions were a set of shatterproof tubes that were filled with liquid and glitter, that twirled and danced when they were turned over or shaken. There were also some squidgy toys in different shapes, filled with sequins and sparkly beads providing sensory stimulation when they were held up to the light box. Teddie loved the feel of them, and the new additions had quickly become firm favourites, Felix had sung the nursery rhyme ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ to Teddie, when he’d first bought the toys and noticed that some of the sequins were star-shaped. Now ‘twinkle, twinkle’ had become his nephew’s way of verbalising the intention to play with them.
Felix had had an affinity with Teddie from the first time they’d met and, despite the fact that he’d come and gone from his nephew’s life because he’d only returned to Cornwall for all-too-brief visits when he’d been living in the States, they’d alwayshad a close bond. Felix was able to understand what the little boy wanted in a way that was only matched by Eden and Drew, and he found the development of Teddie’s language fascinating. If the human mind could create those kinds of building blocks for speech, when the usual path to language development was closed off, then surely it was capable of all kinds of things that the medical field didn’t even know about yet. Felix lived in hope that there’d eventually be huge leaps of progress in terms of understanding the relationship between addiction and brain chemistry, leading to the development of far more effective treatments. It would be too late for far too many people, but there were so many others who needed help. He’d spent all day dealing with the consequences of what happened when they were out of treatment options, and it never got any less devastating.
‘You’ve got a knack of choosing toys he loves. Mum bought him a gorgeous wooden fort, but the only thing he likes about it is the feel of running his hands along the battlements. It doesn’t matter how many times she retrieves the little wooden soldiers and puts them all back in the fort, the first thing Teddie does is to grab them all out again and hurl them to the furthest corner of the room. She still doesn’t quite seem to grasp the fact that Teddie doesn’t play the way she expects him to. But she’s trying.’
‘She is and you know, Mum, she just wants everything to beokayand she struggles when that doesn’t look the way she expects it to. But we know Teddie isn’t just okay, he’s perfect.’ Felix gave his sister’s waist a squeeze. ‘Now what can I get you guys to drink?’
‘You don’t have to get us anything, we just came to check that you were okay.’ Drew looked puzzled when his statement was met with another eye roll from Eden. He’d clearly let the cat out of the bag in his usual direct style, but it was one of the things that Felix liked best about him and there was a lot to like. Drewhad come into his sister’s life in the last year and it was as if he’d been made to fit there. He was a pathologist at St Piran’s Hospital and he had high-functioning autism, which allowed him to understand Teddie in a way that perhaps not even Eden could. Drew clearly adored both her and Teddie, and it was wonderful to see her happier than Felix could ever remember her being, especially after the hell that Teddie’s father had put her through.
Eden had had so much on her plate that Felix had never told her about Meredith. It had been easy to keep his private life private, when he was living thousands of miles away. Eden would have warned him off getting involved with someone with addiction problems and repeating the cycle in the same way she had with Teddie’s father. It was ironic when he’d been the one to caution her against that, but he’d done it himself anyway and it had ended in exactly the way she’d probably have predicted. Maybe it had been mapped out in their DNA after all they’d gone through as kids, but his sister’s newfound happiness with Drew made him happy too and it gave him hope for a future that wouldn’t have any echoes of their past. The last thing he wanted Eden to do was to worry about him now that he was home, but there were some things he knew he couldn’t keep from her forever.
‘I’m fine.’ Felix tried to sound as if he meant it, but he’d been unable to fully shake off his sadness at the loss of another life to addiction. ‘It was an overdose and when we sign up to volunteer at Domusamare we know that sometimes these things are going to happen, don’t we?’
‘Yes, but it’s still a kick in the gut when they do.’ Drew gave him a level look and all he could manage in response was a small nod. ‘It’s especially hard when you think you’re making progress and that someone is on the road to recovery and then it all falls apart.’
When Felix still didn’t answer, Drew continued. ‘You did everything you could. Everyone at the charity did. You’ve got to shake off the feeling of being responsible for the people we work with. We can’t force them to take the help that’s offered or to stay away from the drugs.’
Drew ran a hand through his hair, breaking eye contact. He wasn’t being flippant or trite and Felix knew what he was saying was true. If you took these things home with you then you’d be no good to the next person who needed your help, but it wasn’t easy, especially not when you’d loved an addict, or been parented by one. Felix had done both of those things. It was why he was so determined to continue trying to help others, but it was also what made the blows when they came all the harder to bear. Drew was right, though, he had to be able to separate those things out from his own life.
