I know it’s not! Really, I do! If you would just –
No, Nora says again, and she stands up, shoves the chair back so hard it collides with the kitchen counter; she hears the backboard split. It’s a chair they’d painted together whenshe was little; yellow, like the daffodils, splintered now on the floor.
You were eighteen, Nora, Freya says, following her into the hall. I couldn’t have known it would hurt you so badly, for so long. I couldn’t have known he’d have stayed in touch, or turned up, like this, out of the blue.
It’s not out of the blue, though, is it? We – Bren and I – we –
She is dizzy, with all of it. With what they are, or should have been. Best friends, promised for more; knowing that, without needing to say it, because they felt it, she’dthoughtthey’d felt it. Second-guessed it, felt rejected, ever since. Freya keeps talking while Nora tugs on her shoes. Making excuses, defending herself, but she doesn’t want to hear it. Flashes of the people she’d cared about – Josie’s face, Jon’s laugh, Freya touching his arm and him kissing her neck and Nora’s world shattering as she glimpsed them, from the stairs – Bren on the swings and in her room and halfway across the world but huge in her heart, across the table, saying he’d wanted her with him – hadalwayswanted her, with him – and then she’s out the door, the air cutting cold on her face. She needs to move. She has to get away. She understands, truly, for the first time, why Bren walked out the way he did; because things can hurt, for so long, then all at once become too much. And so she walks out, too. Her mother calling behind her, from the porch, Nora, please, I didn’t want to lose you, and her saying, well, Freya, twelve years too late? It looks like you just did.
TEN
One week has passed since. One week of no messages from Bren, and several from Freya, at first: please, Nora, answer your phone, can we talk about this, before those messages dried up, too. A new strategy, probably, a freezing out from her principled, prickly mother: fine. Nora merely ignored her harder.
You’ve been quiet, Robin says on the Friday night, as they eat takeaway noodles straight from the foil. Gyoza in a plastic tray, salmon-pink slices of ginger. Miso in a cup, cloudy and hot on the coffee table.
Just tired, she tells him. He’s been away on a shoot all week; she’d not had the energy to tell him about Bren and Freya, when she’d got home last weekend. He’d been giddy because of the venue, their newly confirmed wedding date. She hadn’t wanted to ruin that. And then by the Sunday he was gone for an antiques roadshow, and she’d been left alone to think and work and catch the train into the city each day, springtime lightening the mornings, prolonging the evenings, like her own understanding of her past and present. Nothing quite normal, any more.
I meant all week, Robin says. Normally you shower me with snapshots of your day. Your breakfast. Funny typos. Strangers wearing excellent hats.
Nora takes a mouthful of noodles, chewing as he says a particular highlight was when she found a pink rhinestone on the floor of the flat, when neither of them owns anything bespeckled with rhinestones. You just wanted to use the word bespeckled, didn’t you, she says, after she’s swallowed, and Robin laughs. I used the word buffeted, this week, too, he admits. It was a proud moment.
He is being gentle, and not prying; sitting beside her with ease, his shirt unbuttoned. An animated fantasy playing on the television.
I discovered something, this week, she says, because it’s the right time to say it. And because if she tells him – the way she tells him everything – she’ll surely be able to make sense of it.
Oh yeah?
Yeah. It shouldn’t be important, but it feels. I don’t know.
Robin mutes the television.
Is it Bren-related, he asks her, and she looks at him quickly, her heart quick too. He puts the cup of miso down on the coffee table. He seems like he’s got a lot of … baggage, he says. For someone who seems to think he travels light.
That’s perfectly put, she says. And very observant.
I am a photographer, Robin says, feigning conceit. Leaning over for another gyoza. But his stuff isn’t your stuff, Nora. You know that, right?
Nora nods, prodding around in her noodles with her chopsticks. She can’t quite recall how much she’s told Robin, in the past, about Bren and his childhood. That they’d roam the farmers’ fields together, sure, spend hours climbing trees, talking on the swings. Because that’s what teenagers do. Not because Josie was having an episode, and he needed to be kept out of the house. Tears sometimes streaked on his cheeks that she never once acknowledged, because he’d wipe them away when he saw her.
I think it’s hard for him, being home, she says. With everything.
Robin nods, a fleck of soy sauce on his chin.
His dad dying, you mean?
Yeah. But that’s only one part of it. I glimpsed what it must have been like, growing up with Josie. A mother who was okay one day, then really not, the next. And then when Jon died – his name, she thinks, almost hard to say out loud – sosuddenly, when he was the one who, in Bren’s mind, held everything together …
She can’t finish. That man’s a mirage to her, now. All the good things about him, as dead to her as he is, like his lifeless body the coroner came to take away.
It was pretty tragic, she says. And I think Bren’s cut himself off from that tragedy, and everyone else in his life.
Except you, Robin says.
Yeah, Nora says. She eats more noodles, tries to find a way to tell him about the phone call, which with this context, surely, explains why it’s so unsettling – it’s about Bren’s heart, not hers, and it’s only bothering her because she cares, and who wouldn’t care about a guy like Bren who doesn’t even know himself how much he’s hurting – but then Robin asks her a question, in an even voice. Do you have feelings for him?
Nora splutters on a nub of wasabi.
What do youmean!
