The Reunion of a Lifetime

by Fiona Lowe

  At that moment, a man wearing a beautifully tailored suit strode into the room, his presence commanding every atom of air in the small space. Behind him, an elegantly dressed woman in her sixties hesitated in the doorway, as if crossing the threshold held grave danger. Even without being introduced, Lauren immediately knew they were Charlie’s parents. Mrs Ainsworth’s hand rose anxiously to touch her pearls but Mr Ainsworth betrayed no such anxiety, although neither did he smile or frown. None of the Ainsworths moved to embrace Charlie.

  She shot to her feet and Charlie stiffened next to her. ‘Mum. Dad.’

  ‘At least you respond to your grandmother,’ his father said curtly.

  ‘And this is...?’ Mrs Ainsworth stepped into the room, her accent hinting at old money and elocution classes.

  ‘Lauren Fuller, meet my parents Randall and Patrice Ainsworth. Lauren’s Gran’s GP in Horseshoe Bay.’

  A trickle of ice ran along her veins. Okay. I get not being introduced as your lover but I would have thought I qualified as a friend. She tried not to let his descriptor wound her and instead concentrated on extending her hand in greeting. ‘Pleased to meet you both. Is Anna all right?’

  ‘Mum’s resting,’ Randall said crisply. ‘I’m sure you can imagine how difficult and wearing this situation is for everyone.’

  A wrinkle of tension rolled up her spine at his tone. ‘I don’t have to imagine it, Mr Ainsworth. I feel devastated for you and your family.’

  Patrice made a strangled sound and Randall’s commanding aura suddenly sagged under the weight of sadness. He put his arm around his wife. ‘No family should have to face this protracted nightmare. Thirteen bloody years.’ He cleared his throat and his shoulders squared, clearly pulling himself together. ‘If you’ll excuse us, Lauren, Charles and I need to speak outside.’

  Charlie’s hand suddenly gripped her shoulder, his fingers digging in so hard they hit bone. She winced and met his gaze. A tumultuous sea of emotions flickered on his face and then they were swept away, replaced by a remoteness she hadn’t seen in weeks. ‘You go. I’ll wait here.’

  He nodded and strode out of the room, leaving Lauren with Patrice and Harry. The noise of his laboured breathing filled the room and Lauren recognised the ominous sounds of the death rattle.

  Patrice stood gazing down at her son, stroking his hair. ‘I wish you’d met him when he was my darling, talented, impish Harry, instead of—’ Her voice cracked. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not like Randall and Charles. I’m not in the medical field and I can’t cope with any of this. I never have.’

  Lauren considered Randall’s pompous manner and the fact Charlie hadn’t told her anything about Harry. ‘They may not flinch at the hospital setting or be distressed by the sight of a catheter, but I don’t think they’re coping. Medically trained or not, no one deals well with watching someone they love die.’

  ‘And we’ve been waiting and watching for so long now.’ She looked at Lauren pleadingly, guilt scoring her face. ‘I want to remember him how he was, not like this. I don’t visit often. Does that make me a bad mother?’

  The question made Lauren blink hard. ‘No. It makes you human.’

  Patrice nodded slowly, but her expression said she didn’t believe her. ‘Do you have children, Lauren?’

  The old ache of loss burned. ‘No.’

  ‘Once I had two beautiful boys, two precious sons. Now I have none.’

  Surely she meant one? Lauren opened her mouth to ask, What about Charlie? but closed it. My family’s complicated. Sometimes more was learned by silence than by questions.

  ‘Randall and I were overseas when it happened,’ Patrice said, almost to herself. ‘God, I was in the South of France on a yacht, upset because the wrong champagne had been delivered. We should have been here. Randall rails at the fact he wasn’t at the hospital to make the medical decisions. He thinks that if he had been then perhaps things would have been different.’

  ‘I thought your husband’s a cardiologist,’ Lauren said confused by what Patrice meant.

  ‘He is. I meant he struggled with Charles’s instructions that the hospital do everything to keep Harry alive.’

  Lauren winced, her heart splitting between a young, bewildered and inexperienced Charlie and his traumatised and grieving parents. ‘Hindsight favours an accuracy the here and now never offers. From what Charlie tells me, it was a very confusing time. The doctors involved couldn’t have been one hundred percent certain there was no hope. Faced with that crippling type of decision, can you honestly say you would have said, “Let him go.”?’

  ‘Randall would have made the decision and perhaps I would have only lost one son, instead of both.’ Despite her styled hair and perfect make-up, Patrice suddenly looked haggard as she sucked in a deep breath. ‘Things were said in that first year, Lauren. Awful things. Words that fractured our family in ways we’d never contemplated were possible. Nine months after the accident both my sons were alive but unreachable. All thoughts of Charles ultimately working with his father vanished and he’s built a career as far away from us as possible. With it went all my daydreams of extended family holidays at Bide-a-While with grandchildren running around the garden.’

  Patrice cleared her throat. ‘Charles keeps in contact with Harry, though. How ironic is that? He won’t talk to us but he talks to his non-responsive brother. If it wasn’t for the nurses emailing me Charles’s weekly podcast, I’d have no idea where he was in the world or what he was doing.’ She tilted her head and her mouth kicked up in a half-smile. ‘After listening to the last few and reading between the lines, you’re not just Anna’s GP, are you?’

  He mentioned me? Her heart soared. ‘We’re friends.’

  ‘I’m glad. He needs a friend.’

  Lauren’s head and gut spun at the anguish this family had already endured, and was continuing to. Cobbling together what Charlie and Patrice had told her, she realised it was Charlie’s guilt and his parents’ anguish and self-reproach that kept him out of the country more weeks of the year than not.

  Charlie and his father returned to the room, their demeanours equally tense, and Lauren felt the air charge. Patrice rose and, taking Randall’s hand, they left the room. ‘Are you okay?’ Charlie asked her quietly. ‘You look pale. Did Mum say something to upset you?’

  The weight of the Ainsworths’ estrangement pressed in on her. ‘I’m...’ tired ‘...fine and, no, of course your mother didn’t upset me. She’s hurting just like you and your father.’

  He let out an expletive. ‘I just want to be able to say goodbye to Harry without arguing or enduring the arctic freeze that fills the room whenever my parents and I are in it together. Hell, Harry deserves some peace.’

  You all deserve some peace. ‘I’m sure that’s what your parents want as well.’ She stroked his arm. ‘I’d like to help.’

  ‘Huh! We’re long past that.’

  And suddenly her need to help him hurt so much she almost cried out. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Despite everything she’d learned about herself and men over the last decade, despite telling herself that just like him, she was enjoying his friendship and sex while he was in town, she loved him. Not the love of a friend, but a fierce, all-consuming love that cast every other relationship she’d ever had into deep, dark shade. How had she deluded herself that she’d got over him all those years ago when a part of him had once been a part of her and had never completely left her?

  ‘I want to help.’ I can’t not. ‘Let me try.’

  He rubbed the stubble on his jaw, the action filled with chronic exhaustion—the type that came from years of pain—and she felt his resistance waver. ‘What did you have in mind?’

  * * *

  Charlie didn’t know how Lauren pulled it all together, but he would be forever grateful to her that she had. Time was a bastard, bleaching the sharpness of happy memories and leeching them of colour and shape unt
il they were brittle and disintegrated on recall. Over the last decade, Harry had faded from the cheeky and vibrant young man with the off-beat sense of humour they’d all loved and he’d been replaced by a vessel of unrelenting and all-consuming grief.

  Few people visited Harry any more, unable to cope with his living death. The idea of waiting and watching Harry take his last breath, when in so many ways he’d taken it thirteen years ago, came with sadness and a guilt-inducing cocktail of relief. If that wasn’t enough to send him running from the room, sharing the moment with his parents came damn close. But Lauren had found a way for his parents, Gran, the aunts, uncles and cousins, the nursing staff and even some of Harry’s old friends to gather together in the room and give Harry a living funeral.

  She’d asked each of them for something that was quintessentially Harry. His cello appeared, as did soundtracks of him playing it, as well as a soft Frisbee, which was thrown around the room. They ate pizza and Vietnamese noodles, the spicy scent of the food replacing the antiseptic tang of the room, and everyone brought photos. They all took their turn holding Harry’s hand and telling him and everyone else a ‘Harry, do you remember when...?’ story. Amidst the numbing grief generated over the long years there was laughter and tears. Charlie was shocked at one point to see Randall cry and equally surprised that during the fraught hours his mother didn’t reach for any alcohol, sticking instead to coffee from the machine Lauren had managed to procure.

  By six a.m. only the immediate family was left and Lauren slept, snuggled in the depths of the old leather armchair Charlie remembered being in his father’s study years ago. He asked a nurse for a blanket and tucked it around her.

  ‘I told you she was special,’ Gran said, sotto voce.

  ‘I never said she wasn’t,’ Charlie countered, feeling a familiar tightness in his chest and an urge to protect her. An urge to run.

  ‘I like her.’ Patrice glanced at him, her face drawn. ‘She’s given us something special.’

  ‘Your mother’s right,’ Randall said gruffly.

  First light crept in, its orange rays colouring the white walls, and the rattle of Harry’s breathing silenced. Everyone stilled, holding their own breath. The shuddering noise recommenced. They all breathed out.

  Patrice sobbed quietly. ‘When will it end? I can’t take much more of this.’

  ‘It won’t be too much longer,’ Charlie and Randall said, speaking at the same time.

  ‘Goodness,’ Anna said wryly. ‘Can we build on this moment of agreement?’

  Years of estrangement sat between him and his father like a wide and steep-sided gorge that required the engineering feat of a steel single-span bridge to have any hope of bringing them closer. Did his father even want to try? Did he?

  Harry’s breathing stalled again. Charlie pressed his fingers to his brother’s neck, seeking the gentle press of a pulse against the tips. A surge of tears took him by surprise and he fought them. ‘Vale, bro. Wherever you are, I hope the music’s awesome.’

  For so long he’d wished his brother’s body would recognise it was best just to give up, but now it had finally happened, thirteen years less one day to the date of the accident, the relief he’d expected didn’t come. Instead, numbness and cold filled him, along with an abiding sense of pointless futility. He shivered, craving warmth.

  ‘Charlie?’ Lauren’s arms went around him.

  He pulled her in close, burying his face in her hair and jerkily breathing in her salty citrus scent. An edge of the cold thawed and he let his tears fall.

  CHAPTER NINE

  LAUREN ROLLED OVER and brilliant sunshine bored through her closed eyelids, turning the world vermillion. Squinting, she cracked open one eye and took in the elegant décor and remembered she was in the Ainsworths’ guest room. The bedside clock declared it to be one fifty-seven p.m.

  Patrice and Randall had insisted she stay at their Brighton home, saying it was too dangerous for her to drive back to Horseshoe Bay on very little sleep, and Anna had agreed. It was only Charlie who’d been unsettled by the idea, suggesting they get a room in a motel. But after last night Lauren knew that had more to do with his tangled feelings about his parents than wanting to hide her from them. She’d accepted his parents’ offer, not because she had any unrealistic hearts and flowers notion that Harry’s death would offer the family instant reconciliation but because at least it put Charlie in the same physical space as them to nourish any small steps.

  Feeling decidedly seedy, she opened her other eye and saw a note on the pillow scrawled in Charlie’s almost indecipherable spidery writing.

  One p.m. appointment at funeral home.

  Text me when you’re awake.

  Charlie x

  When she’d fallen into bed at eight a.m. Charlie had come with her, wrapping her tightly in his arms as if he was scared she might vanish. In this treasured cocoon, her heart had expanded so quickly it had wobbled giddily, tempting her to hope that he loved her too. He did so many small and thoughtful things for her—surely that was love?

  The combination of exhaustion and security had drawn her into a delicious slumber, so deep that even when the mattress must have surely moved when Charlie had got up, it hadn’t disturbed her. Sitting up quickly, she reached for her phone and suddenly gagged. The taste of stomach acid and the eggs she’d had for breakfast burned her throat. Swallowing hard, she breathed in deeply and slowly, concentrating on keeping the contents of her stomach firmly in place. Back in the frantic days of being an intern, she’d often felt nauseous from fatigue and the same thing always happened to her with jet-lag.

  Despite five hours of solid sleep, she supposed that the emotional turmoil of the last twenty-four hours combined with her previous lack of energy couldn’t be discounted to have taken their toll.

  She texted Charlie: Groggy but awake. Thinking of you. x.

  Moving more slowly, she got up and took a shower then sniffed yesterday’s clothes. Not too whiffy but then again she didn’t have a choice. There was a bottle of perfume on the vanity so she spritzed it into the air and breathed in, checking to see if she liked the scent. Her stomach rebelled at the heavy floral perfume and as she vomited into the white porcelain bowl, she appreciated the small convenience of the toilet in the bathroom. Had she picked up a stomach bug? God, she hoped the Ainsworths didn’t get it. That was the last thing they needed.

  Her mouth felt like the bottom of a cockie’s cage and she systematically opened the drawers under the sink, looking for a toothbrush and toothpaste. Surely, as this was the guest bathroom, these items would be de rigueur. She found neatly folded towels, face cloths, handtowels and a hairdryer in one drawer. The second drawer yielded shampoo, conditioner, razors, shaving cream, aftershave and deodorant for men. She scanned the contents of the third drawer—bath gel, scented deodorant, body lotion, feminine hygiene products and, yay—toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste. The Ainsworths’ guest bathroom was better than a five-star hotel. She tore the packing from the toothbrush, layered on the striped toothpaste that promised to be refreshing, and flicked on the tap.

  As she cleaned her teeth, she leaned towards the mirror and examined her face. It was paler than normal with a few beads of sweat above her top lip but she’d just thrown up so that was to be expected. Pulling back her hair to avoid splashing it with toothpaste, she lowered her head to spit and her breasts caught the edge of the raised basin. Ouch! She spat, rinsed, rose, and grabbed her towel to wipe her face. As she dropped the toothpaste back into the drawer, a candy-striped tampon tin caught her gaze.

  Duh! Tender breasts and tiredness—her period was due.

  You just threw up. You’ve been more tired than usual. The thoughts zoomed in and she batted them away. I’m tired because my period is due.

  Occasionally, she got a shocker of a period and the clue that it was going to be a bad one was always extremely tender breasts. Given she�
�d survived being very nearly mown down by a car, stress had probably played havoc with her hormones this month.

  You. Just. Threw. Up.

  Common sense kicked in. She’d once spent sixteen months not using any contraception, actively trying to get pregnant without any success. She’d only had three weeks of sex with Charlie and they’d used condoms every single time. There was no way she could be pregnant. The odds were virtually non-existent.

  But it happened once before.

  Her heart lurched and her stomach rolled, propelling her back to hug the toilet bowl. She told herself it was stress, a stomach bug, tiredness, but when she started to rationalise that it was also the phase of the moon, she knew what she had to do. Grabbing her phone, she checked the calendar and sat down on the bed. Oh, God. Her period was nine days late. There was only one other time in her life it had been late and that was twelve years ago.

  As if on cue, her phone pinged with a text from Charlie.

  Hey, sleepyhead. Just finishing up here. Going to take Gran direct to Bide-A-While. Want to drive in convoy and break the journey at Greasy Joe’s?

  If her stomach hadn’t already been empty, the thought of fried food would have propelled her straight back to the bathroom. Charlie knew she loved nothing more than a deep-fried dim sim with a potato cake chaser so he’d want to know why she was refusing a treat. No way was she admitting to feeling sick in front of him or Anna, especially not before she knew the reason, and even then, perhaps not.

  Typing, she told him the truth, although it wasn’t the whole truth. I have to pick up a birthday present for Shaylee. I’ll see you at home. Lauren J

  Opening a map app, she typed in ‘shopping mall’. An orange bubble lit up ten kilometres away, displaying a large centre. With five hundred stores in the complex, surely she could buy a birthday present and a pregnancy test. But in which order?