The Home for Broken Hearts

by Rowan Coleman

  “What? What can I do?” Ellen asked. For the first time, the reality of her situation was nudging its way into her consciousness. All she had concentrated on in the months since Nick’s death was living from minute to minute without him, and that had been more than enough for her to deal with; it still was. And now time had run out and she would have to do something for herself, would have to find a way to deal with this situation—and she had no idea how. Ellen twisted her fingers into a tight knot in her lap, feeling panic gripping her chest.

  Hitesh paused, and Ellen wasn’t sure if it was the warm day that made him so uncomfortable or what he knew he had to tell her.

  “Right—well, let’s look at the facts. This house is a good size, well located—you and Charlie could move out and rent it, enough to cover the mortgage until you can sell up and pay it back without charges. You’d still need to find a way to support yourself and Charlie, of course, but rent on a two-bedroom place will be a fraction of your current costs and…”

  “Rent out our home to another family? Move out, you mean?” Ellen swallowed, her mouth suddenly parched.

  “Well, no, you won’t get the same revenue from renting it whole as you would renting it room by room to young professionals or perhaps students. What you’re looking for is to maximize your assets. Now, it’s a bit hooky, renting out without converting the mortgage to a buy-to-let, but I know a letting agent who deals with it on the QT.…”

  “But this is home.” Ellen barely heard her own voice as she whispered the words. “It’s Charlie’s home, his safe place. You know how he’s been since the accident. But at least he has his home, his room, his things around him. I can’t take that away from him, too. I can’t.”

  Hitesh sighed, pinching the top of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, closing his eyes briefly. When he opened them, he held Ellen’s gaze, making her look him in the eye.

  “Ellen, you know Nick was a friend of mine. Shamilla and I consider you and Charlie like family. I don’t want to see you in this position. If there was anything else I could do, I would do it, I promise you—but there isn’t. Nick thought he was invincible, he never thought he was made of flesh and blood like the rest of us. He knew that everything was riding on him coming up with the goods, pulling off a miracle like he always did—it was that kind of risk he thrived on. But this time he couldn’t make everything all right. And even though he didn’t mean to, he’s left you in a mess. Now, if you want to stay in this house without it being repossessed, then you either need to come up with two and a half thousand pounds a month pronto just to survive, or you need to think again. When I say pronto, I mean it—you don’t have enough money in your account to pay next month’s mortgage.” Hitesh leaned forward, his voice softening. “I’m sorry to be harsh, but there it is. I have to make you see. Is there anyone else who could help you—I know Nick’s parents are dead but perhaps yours…?”

  “They don’t have any money,” Ellen told him, thinking of her mum and dad in their chilly bungalow in Hove, surviving on a state pension and very little else.

  “Then you need another plan,” Hitesh explained. “Look, take some time. Think about it. Talk it over with someone. If you find another way, then great. If not, come back to me and I’ll put you in touch with that letting agent.”

  And Ellen had taken some time. But she had chosen not to think. How could she? How could she think about something that was as incomprehensible and irreversible as Nick’s death?

  If only Nick were here. The thought escaped her before she could stop it.

  “Well?” Charlie asked. “Can I?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Ellen hedged. “I need to think about it. It’s a long way away, and you’ve never been skiing before. I’m not sure I want you so far away. It sounds dangerous to me.”

  “Climbing the stairs sounds dangerous to you,” Charlie complained, frustrated. “Mum, if you don’t let me go, everyone will think I’m a mummy’s boy. They’ll think I’m on free school dinners! You have to stop treating me like a kid. I’m not going to die, you know; I’m not Dad.”

  Ellen dipped her head, feeling the warmth of the manuscript beneath her fingers, as if the heat between Eliza and Captain Parker were escaping between the lines. Just a few flimsy pages away, another world—without debt, or dead husbands or angry boys who didn’t know what they were saying or why—was waiting for her. A world where intensely passionate men stole you from your problems and ravished you into delirious submission, conquering you with their love. A world where you didn’t have to do anything except be irresistible. How could she explain to Charlie that even though she knew he wasn’t his dad, and even though she knew it was highly unlikely that she would lose him as suddenly and as violently as she had lost Nick, she couldn’t persuade her heart to feel the same way.

  “So, what would you like for tea tonight?” Ellen asked, weary from the constant onslaught of emotional battles that raged in her head.

  Since Nick’s death, Charlie had eaten only the same thing he had on the last day he saw his father alive: fish fingers, white bread, ketchup, and Frosties with low-fat milk. She’d seen in turn a doctor, a child psychologist, and a dietician, and all of them had said that the best thing was to let him get on with it as long as his health wasn’t being compromised, but every time she fed him something from that all-too-short list, Ellen felt like a failure: a mother who couldn’t even nourish her own son, either with the kind of food he should eat or the love and security he needed to feel in order to eat it. It was proof that no matter how much she tried to fight it, Charlie had been steadily drifting away from her since they had lost Nick, each day edging a little further out of her reach. It wasn’t just the money that made it difficult for her to say yes to this skiing trip. It was the thought of him so far away, even farther away than he was standing right next to her now, that she couldn’t stand. Ellen didn’t think that Charlie blamed her for his father’s death exactly. It was more that he seemed disappointed with his remaining parent. The quiet, loving little boy he’d been now strove more and more each day to be entirely independent from his mother, and Ellen was sure that the skiing trip was part of that, too, another thing he could do without her. The more he struggled to be free of her, the more she wanted to bind him to her, to keep him that same adoring little boy who had held her hand at Nick’s funeral.

  Charlie dipped his head, his shoulders heaving in a sigh, and then after a second or two he put his arms around Ellen’s neck and hugged her, leaning his body into hers. She tensed, taken off guard by the gesture of affection that had become so unfamiliar to her, missing the opportunity to return the embrace before Charlie withdrew.

  “I’m sorry, Mum,” he told her, his lashes lowered. “I’m sorry I’m a pain sometimes. I don’t know why I say the stuff I do. I’m an idiot.”

  “No, you are not.” Tentatively, gently, Ellen put her hands on Charlie’s shoulders and looked into his eyes. “Charlie, this last year—we’ve had a lot to deal with, you and I. And you—you have been anything but an idiot. You’ve been an amazing, strong, brave little boy.” Ellen winced inwardly at her choice of words. “Learning to get on without Dad. It’s hard for us both, and sometimes we do and say things we don’t mean to. None of it matters if we love each other and stick together.”

  Charlie held her gaze for a second, as if he wanted to say something more, something important. But instead he shrugged and stepped out of her embrace.

  “Anyway, I don’t care what the boys at school think,” he told her bullishly, that relic of sweet boyishness passing as quickly as it had arrived. “It doesn’t really matter if I don’t go skiing, I suppose. Emily Greenhurst isn’t going, and she plays the electric guitar.”

  “The electric guitar. Really?” Ellen nodded; this Emily Greenhurst name had started to crop up a lot recently. “Charlie, I’ll be honest. I don’t know about the holiday. It’s a lot of money and we’re still sorting out our finances,” Ellen hedged. There was one person she could as
k for help to pay for the holiday, even if the thought of letting Charlie go horrified her. These school holidays were always supersafe, Ellen told herself, despite her instinctive misgivings. The school had to make sure they were safe these days… although there had been that case on the news a few weeks back about a boy drowning in a canoeing accident. Ellen stifled her anxiety. She didn’t want him to be the only one of his friends who missed out, even if this mysterious Emily Greenhurst wasn’t going. Ellen knew that her younger sister, Hannah, would give her the money, if she was prepared to ask for it, but she just wasn’t sure that she was, not even for Charlie. Hannah, the bright, beautiful, successful one, had made it her business to be around for Ellen a lot since Nick had died. Hannah had always glided through life so effortlessly, the world falling into place around her. For most of her life, Ellen had felt as if she were trailing along behind her little sister, plodding along through life while Hannah blazed a trail, like a bright shooting star. And then Ellen had met Nick, and for the first time in her life she’d had something that Hannah didn’t. A loving relationship, a husband and a son, a proper family home. And as foolish and as shallow as it was, while she had these things Ellen had felt like her sister’s equal, her superior, even. But now all but one of Ellen’s treasures had either gone or were on the brink of being lost, and it would cost her a lot to have to turn to Hannah for help. Even for Charlie.

  “I’ll try my best, okay? And in the meantime, please don’t call people trash. Or ‘gay,’ if you’re using it as an insult.”

  “But it’s okay if you’re using it as a compliment?” Charlie quizzed her. “Like, oh, Simon Harper, you are so wonderfully gay!”

  “Charlie.” Ellen repressed a smile. “You are nearly twelve years old. You know what’s wrong and what’s right—try and stick to it, okay?”

  “Okay.” Charlie grinned. “I actually think Simon Harper is gay, though.”

  “So, fish fingers?” Ellen smiled, ever hopeful that one day he’d change his answer.

  “Yes, please, Mummy.”

  Ellen didn’t know what broke her heart more, the scars left by his father’s death or the fact that sometimes, just for a fleeting moment, her little boy forgot to be all grown up.

  CHAPTER

  Two

  Well, I would have thought it was obvious,” Hannah said, stirring her third spoonful of sugar into her black coffee. Ellen’s sister, younger than she by some nine years, lived on coffee, cigarettes, and sugar, and looked annoyingly good on it; “slender as a willow tree and just as bendy” was how she’d been known to introduce herself to potential lovers, which was pretty much any male within a five-mile radius. “You have to do what that accountant says. You have to consolidate, let the place out, and get somewhere small for you and Charles. I mean, Ellie, it’s only a pile of bricks. It’s not even as if you and Nick lived here all your married life, as if he carried you over the threshold on your wedding day. You’ve only lived here a few years and I never did get why you bought such a huge place when there was only going to be the three of you.…” Hannah faltered, realizing that she had put her foot in her mouth yet again, and stirred her beverage furiously, unable to meet Ellen’s eye for a moment. Both of them knew that when Ellen and Nick bought the house they had planned to fill it with children, a real family home for a real family. But circumstances had changed, and that had become an impossibility long before Nick died. Ellen smarted inwardly; it was just like her sister to pick up on the details that could wound her the most, calling her home a pile of bricks. It was so much more than that—it was symbolic of what her life used to be—of what it should have been.

  “Anyway—it’s just a place,” Hannah stumbled on. “A reminder of everything that you’ve… lost. A fresh start—that’s exactly what you need. If anything, this house is a burden, and it’s one you don’t need.”

  Ellen said nothing for a moment. It had taken her two days since Hitesh’s visit to bring herself to call her sister, and of course she hadn’t really invited Hannah over for coffee to listen to her opinion or advice. The two sisters were so different in every respect that before Nick’s death they had barely seen or spoken to each other, apart from required occasions, birthdays, Christmas—that sort of thing. After his death, though, Hannah had been around much more, which Ellen supposed she ought to be touched by, her kid sister making an effort to be there for her when neither of them really liked or understood each other. But Ellen didn’t get that feeling from Hannah; for some reason, it felt like Hannah wanted to be around her and Charlie for her own sake, as if it were she who needed distracting from Nick’s death. Not long after the funeral, when Ellen had been at her lowest point, Hannah had found her lying in her room, her head buried beneath the pillow, and carefully sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Mum’s made egg and mayo sandwiches,” she’d said. “Do you want one?”

  Ellen had not replied.

  “Look…” Hannah had reached out and laid a hand on her shoulder. “Look, I know how awful this is, how horrific—but you have to think that at least you had him for a while. At least he belonged to you and everyone knew it. And now he always will.”

  Unable to face her sister, Ellen had simply pulled another pillow over her head and cried herself to sleep. But later, when Hannah started making her regular visits, she thought about what she had said on that morning and wondered if her sister, who was so fond of personal dramas and life complications, was a little envious of her. If Hannah somehow found grief and the attention it garnered glamorous… or perhaps it was just the attention that Hannah was envious of. It made Ellen remember the day she graduated from university. It had been one of the rare days of her life when she was the center of everything. Mum and Dad, a miserable and sulky twelve-year-old Hannah in tow, had traveled all the way from home to see her receive her degree. Hannah had moaned and complained the whole day, but what Ellen would always remember was that at the very moment she stood up to collect her degree under a blazing August sky, Hannah fainted, slipping off her chair like a wisp of chiffon and collapsing on the grass. Ellen’s parents had not been looking at her when she was awarded her first-class degree, and rightly or wrongly, Ellen blamed Hannah for that.

  It should seem impossible that anyone would ever envy a widow, but much of Hannah’s life and the way she lived it seemed impossible to Ellen.

  She often wondered if it was because of the age difference. She had been born at the beginning of the seventies, when the world was still an optimistic and gentle place. Hannah, however, a surprise baby if ever there had been one, had entered this world on the cusp of the eighties, kicking and screaming for more, seeming to embody the decade she grew up in, a brash and confident high achiever always hungry for more success, more possessions.

  Now almost thirty-eight, Ellen was dark, olive skinned, with green eyes that Nick had loved, and what Allegra Howard would describe as a comely figure, comfortably curvy, not that she gave much thought to her shape, which she covered with supermarket-bought jeans and an assortment of T-shirts, most of which had been Nick’s. Ellen had never been one to care what she looked like, and Nick had often told her that was one reason he loved her so much. He’d called her his pocket Venus in the bedroom, his goddess alone for him to adore, her hidden charms a veiled mystery to all but him.

  Ellen inhabited the world that Nick had created for her and rarely strayed from it. She existed in her home, in her books, and for her husband and son. It had been a comfortable, comforting cocoon of a world, one that she struggled to find the energy to emerge from now, and one that she simply did not want to leave. Ellen did not want the world outside; she didn’t need it. Her life was small, detailed and rich in the minutiae that only she cared about, and that was exactly how she wanted it, especially now.

  Hannah, on the other hand, thrived on being noticed. Taller than anyone else in the family, including her father, and unfeasibly leggy, she had long ago perfected her glamorous look, boosting her naturally reddish hair with a mon
thly shot of chemical auburn so that it fell in luscious and glossy waves to the middle of her back. She was one of the those lucky few for whom slim hips and a flat stomach did not rule out enough natural cleavage to put on a reasonable display for her many admirers. At just thirty, she was one of the few female fund managers at T. Jenkins Waterford Asset Management, and she had ridden out the financial storm of the last few months with better success than many of her colleagues, whom she’d left by the roadside without so much as a backward glance. Ellen knew that Hannah earned well in excess of six figures and that she probably had enough money in various accounts to buy her house outright if she wanted to. But Ellen would no more have dreamed of asking Hannah to help her out financially than she would have hammered nails into her eyes. At least she wouldn’t if it were not for Charlie’s ski trip. The real reason that Ellen found it so hard to ask Hannah to help her out was that she knew her sister would want to help her and Charlie, knew that it would give Hannah pleasure, and Ellen balked at that. It wasn’t an impulse that she was proud of, particularly when it meant that Charlie missed out, especially when she didn’t really understand her motivation herself. Maybe if Hannah was envious of her, she was envious of Hannah, too—life had always been so easy for her. Even when she frequently got things wrong or made mistakes, it always seemed that the universe rearranged itself around her to smooth things over and make everything better. Ellen had given herself a good talking to before Hannah arrived, telling herself that this request was not about her, it was about her son—but still she hesitated, unable to bring it up.