The Sight of You

by Holly Miller

  “Please, please tell me you succeeded.”

  “I’m sorry, Cal,” he says, and he’s really laughing now. “I got the bottom half, but your bra’s hanging off a gargoyle. There’s no way of reaching it.”

  “Oh, my God!” I sit up, a throb of planetary alignments taking place inside my skull. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  He’s beside himself. “I wish I were.”

  “Then we have to go. We have to check out right now!”

  Joel climbs out of bed and moves over to the sash window, raises the lower frame, and sticks his head through the gap. “Yeah, I think you could be right. Sun’s up. There’s no hiding that beauty now. The green really stands out against the building. Still, on the bright side, it’s drying well.”

  I hurl a pillow at him, but despite my varying dimensions of suffering I’m laughing. “We seriously have to leave.”

  “Don’t you think we could style out breakfast?”

  “No!”

  “How about a quick rendition of ‘Agadoo’ from the shower? You sang it so beautifully last night.”

  Abject horror floods my mind. “We are going, right now.”

  * * *

  • • •

  We pull in at a café on the way home, a dual-carriageway pit stop where they serve only instant coffee in one size of mug, but fifteen variations on a fried egg.

  Beyond the window, the road is a racetrack, the traffic motion-blur.

  Joel looks tired, but in a good way—the kind of tired that reminds me of dawn kisses in bed, or late nights with music and candlelit conversation.

  By contrast, I’m not too sure I want to know what I look like right now. I was so desperate to leave the hotel that I bypassed the hair dryer entirely. Ditto makeup—except for a touch of mascara and a reassuring squirt of perfume.

  “You know you were the hit of the dance floor last night?” I say to Joel.

  “In terms of most-mocked, you mean?”

  “No, I’m serious! For a self-confessed hermit you had some good moves.”

  “Hey, you’re not so bad yourself.”

  “Come on—I’ve got two left feet. Didn’t you see me nearly crash into the band?”

  He finishes his egg roll, wipes his fingers. “They didn’t seem to mind. I think they were flattered by your boundless enthusiasm.”

  “Mildly alarmed might be a better description.”

  “And you were very popular with the kids.”

  That much was true. At one point I found myself surrounded by a gang of under-tens, teaching them how to do the Twist. After some gentle heckling Joel joined in, and for the next twenty minutes or so we were all dancing together—just us and a bunch of sugar-crazed kids—when a thought popped into my mind: We’d be great parents. We’d have so much fun. How many children should we have—two? Five? Ten? I was too happy and tired to restrain my imagination, so instead I just ran with it, enjoyed the fantasy—got drunk on it, almost.

  I trace lazy patterns on Joel’s forearm with my index finger. “Where did you learn to dance?”

  “My mum, actually. We’d have a little boogie together in the living room after school, while we were waiting for Dad to get home from work.”

  A friction burn in my throat, then my eyes. “That’s so sweet.”

  “Ah, you should tell my brother that.”

  I look down at the table. The Formica is diseased with yellow stains that bring to mind the residue of a previous diner’s curry.

  Joel sets down his mug and rubs a hand through his hair, releasing a brief aquatic haze of hotel shampoo. “You know, for such an idiot, Hugo actually managed to pull off a pretty great party.”

  “Want to know what I think?”

  Through coffee steam, he holds my gaze. “Go on.”

  “I think we made it great. I mean, I’m pretty sure you and me could have fun in a silage field.”

  “Well, I’ve never actually tried. But we could find one on the way home if you like.”

  Thinking of the lake, I shake my head. “No more rampaging through open spaces.”

  “Yeah, we’re much safer in the car.”

  I carry on sketching shapes against his skin. “Be great to do this more often. It was okay, wasn’t it? Being away again for the night?”

  “Yeah,” he says, sounding almost surprised, like he’d not really thought about it until now. “It was.”

  “So . . . would you like to? Do this again?”

  “Yeah,” he says, understated as ever. But as he flips his hand over to grip mine, his eyes are a silent movie, a love story without words.

  52.

  Joel

  And then, just one month later, it happens. Exactly as I always feared it would.

  The dream is harrowing, so real it sends a bolt through me.

  Callie’s whispering me awake, but I’m already there. I shake her off, roll away. Bury my face in the mattress.

  Please not Callie.

  Not like this.

  No. No. No.

  PART THREE

  53.

  Callie

  I still think about us, Joel. Probably more than I should. The smallest of things brings you back to me.

  I went swimming at the lido last night, and it took me back to that time you and I jumped into the lake together. A couple of weeks ago I baked some drømmekage, started crying halfway through. I’ve been invited to a hen do, and all I could think about was Cambridge, and the amazing night we spent there.

  I’ve even started reading that sci-fi novel—remember?—and it’s actually quite good! You should definitely give it a go. (Page seventy-nine made me laugh out loud, by the way. Try doing the voice in your head when you read it. You’ll know what I mean when you get there.) Hopefully you’ll still have your copy when you’re reading this. If not, you can have mine.

  It’s been so long since we’ve laughed together. It keeps me going, sometimes, thinking about all the fun we had. The way you lit me up inside, every single day.

  54.

  Joel

  Outside, the sky is swollen with early-August storms. I’m standing at my bedroom window, waiting for the sound of the shower cutting off.

  This is worse than I ever thought possible.

  Above my head, floorboards creak. A new tenant, Danny, has replaced Callie upstairs. He works long hours, is barely around. Occasionally he surfaces to offer pleasantries in passing, before vanishing again like a ghost.

  Already, Callie moving in several weeks ago feels like a series of soon-to-be-forgotten memories. Her dad helping us lug boxes down the stairs, lecturing me about security as if I hadn’t already lived here for a decade. Champagne on the sofa together that first night, a gift from her parents. Our favorite foods finally side by side in the fridge. Shared showers, pots of coffee. Watching Murphy chase balls from the back step. My fingers exploring the newness of her things. Her eclectic collection of trinkets and knickknacks, to her an embarrassment but to me intriguing as treasure.

  I blame myself entirely. I should never have let myself relax, put off calling Steve. Because maybe if I’d taken some kind of action, none of this would be happening.

  55.

  Callie

  Eventually I make it out of the bathroom, stopping still by the chest of drawers that’s spilling over now with my things. I like that, or at least I did—the not-quite-fitting, the idea that we’ve already outgrown the space since I moved in, that we can’t be contained by the world around us.

  “I’m sorry,” Joel says, from where he’s standing by the window like he could happily jump out of it.

  Remembering what happened last night makes me want to cry all over again. It’s too painful to think about the tears that seeped around the edges of his eyelids as he slept, how he gulped my name over and over like he was running out of air.
>
  “Joel . . . this isn’t a sorry thing.”

  He hesitates—on the brink, it seems, of flooding the room with feeling. But at the last moment, he steps back. “Can you cancel tonight?”

  My mind chases its tail. Tonight. Tonight . . . ?

  Eventually I catch up—we’ve arranged dinner at Ben’s, with Esther and Gavin. “Of course.”

  “I just don’t think . . .” But his sentence goes unfinished, so I remain unenlightened as to what he doesn’t think, let alone what he does.

  “Joel, please don’t do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Shut me out.”

  We just look at each other then, assaulted by sadness and powerless to stop it.

  “I mean it when I say I love you,” I whisper.

  “I know.”

  “Not just you, but everything about you.”

  He seems almost dazed with pain as, outside, the sky’s stomach rumbles.

  “It was about me, wasn’t it?” I say. “Your dream last night.”

  His eyes are quite round now, dark as an owl’s. He regards me wordlessly for maybe a minute, like I’m walking away from him and all he can do is watch me go.

  His voice, when it comes, is gentle. “You’re going to be late” is all he says.

  56.

  Joel

  She’s back just before six. I’ve spent most of the day outside, walking the dogs, then sitting in the garden with Murphy. As the clouds waltzed across the sky, I wondered what to do. What I can possibly say.

  I found my gaze landing on Callie’s flowerpots, filled now with bees and a frenzy of butterflies. Her window box is erupting too with summer flowers, the blooms plump with nectar. They embody her so perfectly: splashes of color against gray, life supplanting inertia.

  Our robin chicks fledged ages ago, their nest box deserted now. But for a while the male was still prominent, warbling gutsily from next door’s plum tree. Callie told me he was teaching his babies to sing. Who knows if that’s true, but I liked the idea of it: a centuries-old song sheet, written on the air.

  “Hi.” It’s a tired hi, a breath exhaled. She drops her bag and puts her arms around my neck, kisses me. Sweat has formed a fine white tidemark on her face. She tastes of salt and sadness.

  “How was your day?” I murmur into her hair.

  “Awful,” she tells my T-shirt. I’m almost relieved, but only because I don’t want to be pacified. Assured everything’s okay when it’s not. I’d rather she got angry, called this out for what it is.

  A disaster, and one that’s entirely down to me.

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about your dream.”

  “We need . . .” I can barely get the words out. “We need to talk about it.”

  She pulls back from the hug. “We do. Can we go somewhere?”

  I’d prefer not to have this conversation in public. But since I’m about to take Callie’s life apart, it seems only fair we do this on her terms.

  * * *

  • • •

  We decide on the rooftop bar overlooking the river. It sounds nicer than it is. Pricey, and improbably positioned on the top floor of an office block, it’s always been less popular than you might expect. The view’s good, though the subject’s nondescript: Eversford boasts neither distinctive architecture nor quirky charm. Instead it’s a humdrum patchwork of offices and high-rises, church spires and roof tiles. Eras muddled together, character undefined. Still, we can see the river, silver in the sunlight like a seam of liquid mercury. And the morning’s storms have passed now. The sky’s wide and clear, a pale blue parachute above our heads.

  There are more trees, too, than I ever realized. They erupt between the buildings like little green volcanoes.

  We take a corner table against a tall glass panel, presumably there to stop us plunging to our deaths. I need to think clearly, so I order a coffee, but Callie opts for a glass of white wine. Can’t say I blame her. The floral dress she’s changed into is so incongruously cheerful it’s almost painful to look at.

  She’s first to speak. “You dreamed about me last night, didn’t you?”

  A nod, but no words. My mouth’s become rubber.

  “You were saying my name over and over. You were so upset. God, it made me . . . so sad to see you like that.”

  My chest constricts: it’s my turn now. But even after a full day of running everything over in my mind, I still have nowhere near the words I need to make sense of this.

  “Cal, I’m scared that what I say—”

  She cuts me off. “Then don’t. You don’t have to say anything. I’ll ask, and all you have to do is nod, or shake your head.”

  I breathe in. Or maybe it’s out. Her resolve has thrown me slightly.

  Across the table, her eyes find mine. “Sometimes words are the hardest part.”

  “Tonight they are.”

  It only takes three questions in the end. Three questions, and a matter of moments.

  “Did I die?”

  Yes.

  “Do you know how?”

  I force myself to picture her again lying lifeless on the ground. No injuries. No blood. No clues. No.

  “Do you know when?”

  Yes.

  We’re quiet then, eyes picking up where our mouths leave off. Hoots of laughter drift over from a nearby table as, down on the ground, Eversford’s traffic moves. The world has refused to stop turning. Life rumbles heartlessly on.

  I know I have to speak. Outline what scant plan I have. “There may be something—”

  “Wait.” She covers my hand with hers. It feels curiously cold. “Don’t say any more.”

  “But if you—”

  “I mean it, Joel. I don’t want you to say any more. You need to listen to me.”

  So I stop talking, train my eyes numbly on her flying-swallow necklace instead. It’s the same one that so struck me all those months ago, when I first met her at the café.

  “I don’t want to know anything else. Nothing about what you dreamed. I don’t want to know what you saw, or when it will be. Ever. I never want to know. Okay?”

  I stare at her. The tears in her eyes have been swapped for steel. “Cal, I don’t think you—”

  “I do.” Her voice cuts through the sweet air of the evening. She withdraws her hand from mine. “I do understand. All I know, right now, is that I’m going to die. I don’t know how it happens, or when it will be. I’m no different to anyone else here tonight.” She glances at our waiter, then a raucous group of drinkers a couple of tables away.

  “But I know.”

  “Yes. And if you told me, you’d be giving me a terminal illness. Right here, right now.”

  “Cal,” I say, “how can you not want to know this? There may be something we can—”

  “But there isn’t. You’ve already said you don’t know how it happens. You’re as helpless as me, Joel, and you know it.”

  “Callie.” My voice buckles with emotion. “Please let me just—”

  “No, Joel. This is my decision. I can’t deal with a death sentence.”

  I think of my mum, denied the precious time she wanted to prepare. The fact that all my fears about love since she passed away are playing out now with Callie is almost more than I can bear. “Do you really mean that?”

  She nods, just once.

  I take her hand again. Grip it hard. Maybe I’m trying to squeeze it full of sense. “I can’t live with me knowing and you not.”

  “You want to unburden yourself?”

  “No, it’s not that.” But then I wonder if it is.

  “You know what this means, don’t you?”

  “It means too many things.”

  “It means you love me.”

  Trust Callie to see the upside. There’s even the softest of smiles on her
face. “Callie—”

  “You can say it now. The worst has happened. You don’t have to be afraid anymore.” And then she leans across the table, kisses me.

  But as I kiss her back, all I can see is her body on the ground.

  There’s not a single twinge of movement, and her skin is cold as milk.

  57.

  Callie

  In the week following Joel’s dream I struggle to maintain normality. Instead of joining Fiona and Liam in the yard at lunchtimes, I make my way down to the river and climb the old willow alone. Conversations with my colleagues have already assumed a different color—it’s hard to chip in to discussions about last night’s TV, or the rise of the discount supermarkets, when Joel and I are spending our evenings blighted by discord over the date of my death.

  On Friday night, flagging from hours of pushing an industrial mower through meadows, I climb the tree, then remove my boots and socks. Blending in with the branches as walkers pass beneath the bare soles of my feet, I feel the pleasing sensation of blood rushing through my calves to my toes. Dragonflies buzz by, tiny shiny helicopters, and from the marsh on the opposite bank comes the primal ache of calling cattle. All day the air has been warm and still, static with summer, save for the hot popping of exploding seed heads.

  I can only think of Joel—warm-blooded and full-hearted, his self-contained demeanor masking a fever of agonies within. I try to imagine him telling me what he knows, the seismic repercussions as the groundswell passes through him to me. I consider the ways in which our lives would change, and what we would become.

  There’s no knowing who I’d turn into, whether the information would be toxic, alter me entirely. It’s no accident, surely, that we’re biologically programmed to be ignorant of this stuff.

  I envisage weighing out my days, how the chemistry of every experience would change. Perhaps I’d jettison everything dear to me, and all the while, the end would be drawing near, winding ever closer like the dark finger of a tornado.