It is still mortifying, to him, all these years later.
I made her write it down, he goes on, as Nora stares at him. What town I’d be staying in, what airport you should fly into. And I.
Told her I’d wait for you, he does not say, because he can’t bear to repeat it.
Was told she’d pass it on, he finishes. All that anger in him, changing colour, like Nora’s face. Her stillness, now, quite unnatural.
She didn’t, is all that she says.
They look at each other over their drinks.
Why didn’t you … she begins, her voice catching. Why didn’t you call the house again. Or email me, or something.
It was just too crazy when – and another memory comes at him, his father falling down, in front of him, so he talks faster, to keep it at bay – and you were at school, and I wasn’t, because –
My dad’s heart had stopped and I was a mess.
And I found a flight leaving that afternoon, he says. With one spare seat. And I didn’t think about it, I told my mum I wanted to go and she just said I should, if I needed to, and so I just … went. Because I couldn’t be there, with her. I couldn’tdoanything, to help.
He wills Nora to move. Just nod, even, but she doesn’t.
But we had a plan, Nora, I know, Bren says. And that hadn’t changed, for me, just because I left … a bit early.
She keeps her eyes on his. The only part of her that seems able to move, searching his own; like she’s not sure whether to believe him.
I had to race to the airport to make it, Bren says, reliving the nearly missed train, his sprint through security. But at the gate I stopped to think, for like, two minutes, and I knew I should tell you, before I got on that plane, so I called. It was after school, by then, but Freya picked up, said you were next door with my mum. ‘Like you should be,’ she said.
Swallow, then, as he remembers. Knowing that would be the story, always; that he’d left in his mother’s hour of need: when that need was in fact endless, and if he stayed, he’d never be able to break free.
But we were boarding, he says, so I just told her, instead. She was fuming with me, Nora, for leaving, but when I asked her if she’d tell you everything, she said she would. And I really thought I’d get on that plane and you’d come join me, at some point. After the funeral, maybe, when you were ready. But you never came. You never even … picked up the phone, or sent an email, to say why.
The memory of it like heartburn, as he recalls checking and rechecking his phone, waiting for her response, sort of sick and sort of free but also certain he couldn’t have stayed. Calling her house, in the end, a few weeks after he’d touched down in a new place and rented a room and still heard nothing.Saying hi, when she picked up. Long pause before she said it back. Dredging up the courage to ask, you spoke to your mum, then? and her reply, tight, and quiet: yeah, Bren, I did.
Shame, afterwards. Hot, and thick.
So I guess that’s it, he’d said, with a tightness of his own.
Yeah. I guess it is.
And not once, in all this time, had he considered she’d not been given the right message; not once had he conceived of the fact that she might never have known that he’d left, yes, but not lefther. That he’d wanted her beside him. And like the bubbles in her lemonade, all of his resentment, all his own fury and confusion, rises to the surface, and dissipates. Everything he thought had been her rejection of him, evaporating, because it turns out she must have been thinking the same.
They feel this, in the quiet parts of themselves, as the city sky beyond the window falls to black. Ice melting in her glass. Music thumping overhead.
All this time, Bren says, you thought I’d just gone?
No nod, or noise; Nora’s face doesn’t look like her own.
God, he says, as the music changes. No wonder you’re so mad at me.
_
Nora leaves, but does not head home to her flat. She gets on a train and then a bus to her mother’s cottage, watching unseeing through the dark; Bren stays in London, saying he wants to eat, walk, clear his head. Alone, she feels like a set of jangling keys, all nerves and sharp edges, the bus jerking stop-start at every junction, but soon enough, she’s letting herself through the porch, only to find the house empty. The greenhouse, too. So she sits at the kitchen table and waits, hardening with every tick of the hot pink clock. Numbers, swirling, in her head.
Twelve years, it’s been, since she saw what she saw in the upstairs bathroom; since she pretended not to, and tiptoed away, reeling. Four weeks of silence and shame, avoiding Jon, until she didn’t have to, because he was gone.Gone. Twelve years since his cardiac arrest, since Nora held Bren as he yelled no, in the driveway, no, Dad, no. Nineteen minutes for the paramedics to arrive,sixty-twoof trying to restart his heart. Josie, inside. Freya, pacing. Nora, not knowing how to feel about this man she had loved, was livid with – but what did it matter, now, because he was dead. And there was nothing left to do, except quash it all down.
Twelve years of keeping that secret.
Twelve years, too, since Bren had left.
