by Holly Miller
“No need,” I say quickly. “I’m just curious.”
“You’d tell me if—”
“Dad, it’s nothing, honestly. Actually, forget I said anything.” I straighten up, suck in fresh air. “What’s next?”
“Parsley, please,” he says, but like he’s not entirely reassured.
* * *
• • •
Later, as I’m getting ready to leave, I say, without really intending to, “Dad, how much do you think you should sacrifice for someone you love?”
“That depends on what you’re sacrificing,” Dad says.
“Well, if it’s something that would make the other person happy, but your life a lot worse, should you do it?”
Dad frowns. “I can’t really answer that, Callie, without knowing the circumstances.”
Well, they’re the worst, I think. As bad as you could possibly imagine.
“Found it!” Mum calls from upstairs, where she’s been hunting down a newspaper clipping she’s saved for me.
I reach up to kiss him. “That’s fair enough. Love you, Dad.”
“In the end, I suppose, it all depends on whether Joel loves you back.”
Busted. I look down at the carpet.
He does love me, Dad. He just can’t bring himself to say it.
64.
Joel
Warren and I are sitting on the deck of a bar overlooking Fistral Beach, a pint apiece and a portion of nachos between us. The sky and sea are shimmering, the surf pumping.
Even though it’s just after lunch on a Monday, there seem to be plenty of people around. They’re chatting on the sand, pausing by our table in shorts and flip-flops to shake Warren’s hand and comment on the waves. I’m starting to feel distinctly suburban, sitting here in my trainers and jeans. Though I fit right in, in terms of having nowhere else to be, I guess.
This is how we’ve spent the last couple of days. Mostly outdoors, in front of a series of spectacular vistas. Tentatively getting to know each other. Trying to make sense of the missing years.
He doesn’t introduce me to anyone as his son. He just says, This is Joel. And people shake my hand too, ask how it’s going.
“Do they know?” I ask him now.
Warren dips a nacho methodically between sour cream, guacamole, and salsa. “Do who know what?”
“Friends, acquaintances. About you. The dreams.”
He shrugs as he chews. “Some do. Some don’t.”
I stare at him, incredulous. “And what do they think?”
“You’d have to ask them.”
“I don’t want to. I’m asking you.”
“I reckon some think I’m bonkers. Some believe me. Most don’t care.” He plucks another nacho from the pile, pulling a string of cheese with it until it twangs. “One thing you learn as you get older, Joel, is that people care far less about your private business than you might think.”
“But . . . why? Why did you tell them?”
He smiles. “Because I finally decided it’s easier than carrying the thing like a dead weight around my neck.”
I sip my lager, stare out at the waves. Then I recount the story of my university doctor. Explain how judgmental my dad and brother can be.
Warren looks out to sea as he listens. “People are a bit more open-minded these days,” he says, when I’ve finished. “Look at Callie. And your friend . . . Steve, is it?”
I frown, say nothing.
“Or maybe it’s just the people I knock about with. The things some of them do . . . Once you’ve ridden a forty-foot wave, you start to see life a little differently. It’s a kind of narcotic, and most of the people I know are on it. They wouldn’t give more than a passing thought to me and my crazy dreams.”
“You’ve surfed forty-foot waves?” I say, after a moment.
He snorts. “Not me. Big waves and old men don’t mix. You, on the other hand . . .”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Exactly, Joel.” He leans forward. “If there’s one thing I’ve realized over the past few years, it’s that getting out of your own head for a bit works wonders. Doing something different. Trusting the world around you.”
“You’re not going to start talking about surfing being the source, are you?”
He laughs. “Ha. I might.”
“But are you really happy?” I press him. “You’re not—”
“With anyone?” He leans back in his chair. “There’s more than one way to be happy in this life, Joel.”
I smile too. I have to. Because, despite everything, it feels so good just to talk with someone who really understands. To actually know, for the first time in my life, that I’m not alone in this. “Do you know what, Warren? I think you might be a bit of a hippie.”
“Is that a compliment?”
I raise my eyebrows, swipe the last nacho for myself. “I haven’t decided yet.”
* * *
• • •
After four nights in Cornwall I drive home. In the early hours I stop at a service station, drink coffee in their weird little amphitheater-café. Try to rest my eyes before making the final push back to Eversford.
At a nearby table, a woman’s comforting a baby. Her partner’s next to her, scarfing a doughnut as he blinks into UV-grade lighting. But it’s the woman I’m most interested in. Her eyes are shut and, though she’s trying to rock her baby to sleep in a service station at two a.m., she looks pretty happy. Calm and content, like she’s listening to a harpist or getting a massage.
She reminds me of Callie. Same heart-shaped face, same long dark hair. Same profile when she turns her head. The similarity’s so striking, I can’t stop staring (until her partner starts to look as though he might get up and make me, which is both reasonable and my cue to leave).
I swing onto the M4 again, begin the last leg back to Eversford. But Callie’s double with the child in her arms keeps tweaking the sleeve of my consciousness. And before long a thought corkscrews through me: if this condition is hereditary, then, for me, kids can never be an option. Despite that beautiful fleeting moment a few months ago, when I pictured Callie pregnant . . . I couldn’t inflict the way I live on an innocent soul.
But where does that leave Callie? Though she’s never said as much, I’m pretty sure she wants children. Or, at least, she’s never given me reason to think she doesn’t. Her parents have dropped a few hints about it. Plus she has that rare and natural gift with kids that makes them cling to her legs, cry when she leaves. I picture her playing with my nieces and nephew. Teaching a floorful of under-tens to twist at Hugo’s wedding. She was thinking about working in child care, for God’s sake. And if a family is something she wants, I can’t be the one who stands in her way.
Adoption? For some reason I can picture my sister suggesting it, worried as always I’m denying myself life’s joys. But adoption doesn’t feel like something I’d want to explore. Because I’d still be the same: fixating on my dreams, worrying about Callie. And even without having passed on my condition, I’d mess the kid up somehow, I’m sure. Hand down my neuroses, infect them with anxiety.
I imagine the years rolling by, Callie and I stagnating as I count grimly down to her death. In those early days of agony with Mum, when I knew about the cancer before she did, all I could think about was how things would be four years down the line. Life lost its color, turned gradually grayer. How can I go through that again, and still make Callie happy? It’s not possible. It’s just not.
I remember what she said to me as we drove home on Boxing Day last year. About seeing my dreams as a gift. And I feel a fresh onrush of sorrow, because I know now that to me they will always be a curse.
* * *
• • •
It’s nearly four when I get in. I can’t bring myself to wake her, so I stay in the living room with Murphy.
There’s more than one way to be happy in this life.
65.
Callie
I wake at about six thirty, just as light is starting to leak through the blinds. Something tells me Joel is home, so I pull on the tractor T-shirt he gave me at Christmas and pad through to the living room.
I find him on the sofa. He’s slung his head back against the cushions and is staring at the ceiling, completely still.
“Hello,” I whisper, sitting down next to him and taking his hand. “What are you doing in here?”
The look on his face is enough to break me. “Sorry. Didn’t want to wake you.”
“How was Cornwall?” I reach down to ruffle the dog’s ears. “We missed you.”
“I missed you too.”
Our eyes meet as, close to the open window, a bird performs a solo.
“Name that bird,” Joel murmurs.
“Robin. He’s been singing all night.”
“All night?”
I nod. “It’s the streetlamps. He thinks it’s daytime.”
“Seems unfair, somehow. That he doesn’t get any sleep.”
“Neither do you, night owl.”
A moment passes.
“They only live for two years, you know,” I say.
“Who do?”
“Robins.”
He leans forward and kisses me then, and it’s a kiss for all the feelings words can’t cover. He tastes of exhaustion and coffee. As he moves down to my neck, his mouth hot and damp, I am seized by an almost frenzied hunger for him, to show him just how much he means to me, how much I hate to be away from him. And he must be feeling the same way, because our kissing swiftly becomes urgent, our movements frenetic. As our T-shirts come off I tremble at the touch of his hands on my bare skin, and he too seems almost to shake with desire as he eases his hand between us to tug down my underwear. All at once he’s inside me, lowering his eyes to mine, and I take in nothing but this moment, his face, the sound of him gasping my name.
Afterward, as we collapse flushed and unclothed against each other, the whole world draws to a pause. Light is suspended against our skin, and the morning holds its breath.
* * *
• • •
Over coffee, Joel explains more about Warren and his parents, their heartbreaking history. He reveals that Warren has the same condition, that he’s gone through all the same things Joel has. Tamsin and Doug are only his half siblings, he tells me, Tom having succeeded at keeping the three of them in the dark until now.
I picture visiting Warren in Cornwall in happier circumstances. Perhaps he’d have taught me and Joel to surf. I envisage sea spray and sunshine, salted water rushing rocks, and feel regret ratchet through me.
“That’s so much to take in,” I say, when he’s finished talking, reaching for his hand.
“I can find a way to deal with all that, Callie . . .”
It’s the other stuff you can’t. “Did you tell Warren what you dreamed about me?”
“No. I couldn’t. I think . . .”
I wait.
“. . . it might have broken him.”
“I can understand that. It would break me too.”
He stares down into his lap. “The thing is . . . after seeing Warren, I can’t stop thinking about my mum. The way she looked at me, when she told us she had cancer.”
“How? How did she look at you?”
“Like she wished I’d told her sooner. It’s the biggest regret of my life, Cal, that I kept it to myself. That I didn’t give her more time to prepare.”
Though my stomach spins with sympathy, my mind is resolute. “You don’t know how it happens with me, though. There’s nothing either of us can do.”
“But I know when—”
“No.” I’ve never felt so certain of anything. Looking over at Joel, I let my eyes traverse the sweet shades of his face. “No suggestions, no clues. I told you I didn’t want to know, and I don’t. I couldn’t live my life if—”
“Callie, please, just—”
“No. Once the words are out there, you can’t take them back. Everything changes forever.”
He nods slowly. “I’m just not sure that I can go through life,” he says, “and not once give you a clue, or something you take to be one.”
I wonder if he’s right, if I will start seeing signs in everything now—a low mood, a shed tear, a prolonged pause. Is our life together destined to become one long series of second guesses?
The room becomes quiet as a canyon.
“You don’t have to stay,” he says eventually.
Tears swarm my eyes. “With you?”
He nods.
“That isn’t what I—”
“I know. But I need you to know that . . . you don’t have to.”
“I want to stay, Joel. Because I love you.”
We share a look a mile long.
And then, “I love you too,” he whispers.
I stare at him. After all these months, he’s finally said it back.
Though his eyes are glazed with tears, he doesn’t look away. “You’re right,” he says. “What’s the worst that can happen now? I was stupid not to say it before. I love you, Callie. I love you so much. I always have.” He encircles me with his arms, presses his face against my neck and murmurs it over and over, against my flushing skin.
* * *
• • •
That night in bed my hands find him, desperate to stop us spiraling off onto opposite flight paths. His mouth is on mine straightaway, fierce and tender all at once. But it’s a sad sort of tenderness, the kind you see in black-and-white films. Like we’re kissing through the open window of a steam train, just before the whistle blows.
66.
Joel
It’s early October, a fortnight since my return from Cornwall. For the past few hours, Callie’s been at dinner with Esther, Gavin, and Ben.
I backed out at the last minute, claiming a headache she didn’t buy for a nanosecond. But I’d been struggling all day. On top of everything else, I was still feeling unsettled by a dream I’d had about Buddy a few nights previously, falling off his push-bike.
“We’re still a couple, aren’t we?” she asked me, thirty minutes before leaving the flat. She was half-dressed in front of the mirror, her hair in rollers. I was sitting on the bed behind her. I’d have forgiven her for wondering, as she looked at me looking at her, if what we had was nothing more than an illusion. Something she could see but felt cold to the touch.
“Of course we are,” I murmured. Still, where was the evidence? Every day I wait and hope for something to change, a solution to present itself. But nothing ever does.
“Then I’ll stay at home with you.”
“No, I want you to go.” Because I did. I wanted her to have fun, forget everything that’s going on. I didn’t want to drag her down with me.
I guess she must be having a good time. It’s midnight, and there’s still no sign of her. No messages to say she’ll be home soon.
I’m shivering in the garden on the phone to Warren, looking back at the flat. Our flat, where we’d started making memories. There’s a single light on in the kitchen, throbbing orange like a dying flame. Above ours, Danny’s windows are dark and still.
“I dreamed about Callie.”
“I’m sorry,” Warren says.
“It’s not good.”
Warren clears his throat. “You know when she’s going to . . . ?”
“Eight years,” I manage, before my composure lands
lides.
He just lets me cry for a while, supportively silent as a helpline volunteer.
Once I’ve recovered he asks for details. There are scant few, of course.
“I don’t know how it happens,” I finish by saying. “I got no clues in the dream. And not knowing that . . .”
“. . . is the worst part,” Warren surmises.
I agree, describe Callie’s fierce resistance to any intervention.
“What about her dad?”
“What about him?”
“Didn’t you say he was a doctor?”
“Ex. He’s retired now. But I can’t ask him for help.”
“Why not?”
“You’re suggesting I tell him? Everything?”
“Not everything. Just sound him out. You could see if there’s any family medical history that might be relevant. There are ways to frame things.”
“I’m not sure.” Callie’s dad is pretty smart. He does the cryptic crossword every day, for one thing. He’d decipher me in seconds.
“You need to try everything, mate.”
It’s that innocuous mate that does it, that feels so unexpectedly incendiary. I wish I’d had you, I want to rage. I wish I’d had you to help me through this, all these years.
But I don’t. I just sling my head back and stare at the sky, pinned up above me by a million stars.
“I dreamed Mum died,” I tell him, after a few moments. “I knew she was going to die from cancer, and I never said anything. It’s the biggest regret of my life.”
“You were just a kid, Joel,” he says softly.
“But the way she looked at me, when she found out . . .”
“Telling Callie when she’s going to die won’t bring your mum back, Joel.”
“What are you saying?” But I think I know.
“Well, if Callie’s adamant she doesn’t want to find out, then ultimately, you have to respect that.”
