The Day I lost You

by Fionnuala Kearney

  In Rose’s room, I hoover the floor, which is covered in glitter from the birthday card she made. I strip her bed, find a few pieces of Lego in the sheets, and toss them into a large box underneath. Her scent lingers on the bedding and, as I make my way downstairs to the washing machine, past Anna’s mound of shoes, I inhale it.

  Downstairs, my phone vibrates a message from Theo. A firm friend since we worked together over ten years ago, he’s someone I know I can trust with my mood today.

  ‘Happy Birthday’ seems all wrong. Costa at 12? X

  I read his text and consider saying no. Theo’s probably just on an hour’s break from the surgery, and I should probably be more mindful of my state affecting another. But the thought of a long and lonely birthday stretching before me stops me doing the right thing.

  It’s exactly midday and he is there first, two coffees already in front of him, sitting in the booth to the rear of the café, our usual perch for putting the world to rights. The scent of crushed, bitter coffee beans fills the air. It pokes a memory of the day Anna went missing, the day of the Christmas fair.

  ‘Before I sit down,’ I say. ‘One thing …’

  Theo’s eyebrows stretch.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about my birthday.’

  The stretch reaches further, creasing his forehead.

  ‘Theo?’ I refuse to sit down until he agrees.

  ‘Okay.’ He pushes a coffee to the opposite side of the table from him and I slide into the booth. ‘So,’ he says. ‘How’re you coping with the fact that today is Anna’s birthday?’

  My eyes close slowly.

  ‘What?’ he says. ‘You told me not to mention your birthday. You never said anything about not mentioning hers.’

  I pretend he hasn’t spoken, take a sip of the coffee, make a face, then swap it. ‘Sugar,’ is all I say.

  I want to talk but can’t. I want to cry, but only seem to be able to do it in my sleep. An empty but easy silence falls between us. It’s like that with us sometimes. We’ve been friends for such a long time that the quiet doesn’t scare us. Theo rubs his nose with the back of his hand.

  ‘It’s no easier,’ I finally speak. ‘I swear. Some days – it’s everything I can do to breathe.’ I’m reminded when I hear these words aloud how badly I behaved to Leah. ‘That line about time healing isn’t true,’ I tell Theo. ‘All lies. Time doesn’t heal.’

  ‘It will. Days like today will always be the worst.’

  My head shakes. ‘Today’s bad. Yesterday was worse – the apprehension … It’s like physical pain and it’s all over, every muscle, every nerve ending in my body.’ I grip the handle on the coffee mug so tightly that my knuckles whiten. ‘Before … birthdays, sharing the day together, it was such a special thing, as if she always knew that she was the best birthday present I ever got.’

  He sips his coffee, his silence letting me know he gets it, then deftly changes the subject.

  ‘Are you doing anything tonight?’

  ‘Dinner at Leah’s. Gus is cooking,’ I tell him. ‘But I’ll see how I feel. I’m not sure I’ll go.’

  ‘You look like you could do with a hug.’

  My eyes dart around our local Costa. ‘No thanks, you’re all right. Granted you’re separated, but you’ve probably got half a dozen patients in here and you’re still a married man.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ he says.

  ‘What does “Hmmm” mean?’

  ‘Nothing. We’re here to talk about you. You want something to eat? You should eat. You’re all skin and bone.’

  I refuse food. ‘How’s Finn doing?’ I have found it hard since Harriet walked out on their marriage to understand how she also walked away from their eleven-year-old son.

  ‘He seems all right. This is the first half-term where he gets parents sharing him. It’ll be strange. You spend more time with him during school hours than I do.’ His smile is half questioning, but it’s not something I’m prepared to get into – not today. Finn is not himself in school, seems attention seeking; but then again, that’s probably only to be expected.

  ‘Right. I should get back.’ He taps his hands, palms down, on the edge of the table, then stands. ‘You want that hug?’ His eyes, the same colour as the casual khaki-coloured trousers he wears today, rest on mine.

  We embrace. He holds me tight. I catch a whiff of his aftershave, and all I can think of is Anna. I close my eyes, pretend that this moment of closeness is with her; pretend that it’s her scent – a floral, sweet one rather than a musky one – that I’m inhaling. I have to stop myself clinging to him.

  ‘This time last year, remember the night?’ he whispers.

  I do remember. A crowd of us went out to celebrate my birthday and I ended up dancing on the table. It was a night for Sean to have Rose, and Anna had called to collect me in a cab after being out with her own friends. ‘Taxi for drunk mother!’ she had called into the pub.

  ‘It’s good to think of fun times,’ he says.

  Theo seems to know the exact picture I have flooding through my brain. He rests his hand on the top of my back and, for a brief second, I think he’s going to say something profound, something that might make a difference – some insight into how I’m going to handle this all-consuming, exhausting, loss. Instead he says, ‘It’s shit, Jess. Nothing I say will make it better, but I will keep on trying.’

  His remark’s not profound but, somehow, it helps.

  It’s ten forty. I’m lying in bed on the night of my forty-eighth birthday. My mother has left two answerphone messages for me, neither of which I have felt able to respond to. My ex-husband sent me a text telling me he is thinking of me. My only sister is mad at me for walking away from her this morning and cancelling dinner tonight. My beloved granddaughter is in another country with her father and his parents. My friend’s marriage is over and, though he still wants to help me, I’m not sure anyone can. It’s Anna I want to hear from.

  I snap a Valium from a pack Theo prescribed. Tonight, I need to sleep.

  I’m floating on an airbed on a calm sea, rising and falling with the gentle ebb of the dark blue ocean – the colour of her eyes … I recognize the beach from a holiday we’d taken years ago – Doug, me and Anna. She’s there, on the sand, and she’s waving to me. I’m so thrilled to see her that I slide from the airbed, begin to swim back to shore. All the while, she’s laughing and waving, calling to me, ‘Mama! I’m here!’ And as I swim as fast as my limbs will allow, I’m crying, thinking, ‘She’s not missing, after all. Look! There she is, you can see her.’

  I stop swimming, tread water for a moment, am frustrated as I don’t seem to be nearing her. ‘Mama!’ she continues to call. ‘Over here!’ And then I see it, a huge sea of white behind her. It’s moving quickly and I’m confused. How can a white wave be coming for her? I’m the one in the sea. When it swallows her whole, I feel myself sinking underwater. As I fall, I tell myself she’s still alive, but I know … I know she would never have left Rose.

  I wake, groggy. My face is wet.

  I cannot cry, but every night I seem to swallow the sea and the salt water escapes through my eyes.

  2. Anna

  Raw Honey Blogspot 02/09/2013

  I love to sing! Anyone who knows me knows it; whether I’m white-wired into my phone on a Tube full of strangers looking at me oddly, or doing my thing from the back row of the choir. I’m the one in the karaoke bar who doesn’t need to look at a screen to know the words. I’m the one driving along singing at the top of my voice to the radio. I still use the hairbrush as a mic in the mirror. I know. Sad, but true.

  My darling daughter (DD) has definitely inherited this need to sing from me. That and long legs. She’s just exhausted me for the last forty minutes; insisting on wearing every hat in my collection (over forty last count) while she sashayed around my bedroom on those legs, singing to Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’. We did the chorus together and she does a good tiger roar, DD; seems to ‘get’ the story of the song; seems to want to tell the
world that even at four years old, she’s not going to take any shit from anyone. I love that in her.

  Afterwards, we have quiet time. Ten minutes with her in her bed and a book of her choice, where I read fairy tales with hopelessly happy endings that I dare to believe in too. And when she wraps those tiny arms around my neck and whispers ‘Goodnight, Mummy,’ my heart melts.

  Mama is right. There’s nothing quite like it. That love that you get from a child; where they look to you for everything, to fill their every need. It’s brilliant. It fills me up. Her laugh, her smile, her giggle, her sunny nature. I am quite biased but she’s quite perfect.

  And she’s like her dad: that enquiring mind, those inquisitive eyes, though they’re the same colour as mine, they pucker at the edges just like his. Those eyes were the first thing I ever noticed about Him. That first look, that first day we were introduced, He seemed to stare right into me. I felt exposed, vulnerable. Then He smiled and let me know that whatever it was that He’d seen, there in my soul, that it was beautiful; that I was beautiful and that He could see it.

  Comment: Crash-bambam

  I’ve just had my first baby and know exactly what you mean about a mother’s love. There’s times I feel totally overwhelmed by it all!

  Reply: Honey-girl

  Just try to slow everything down and enjoy. It gets easier, I promise!

  Comment: Idiotlove

  Where’d you meet him, the soul-searcher guy? Know any more like him?! I’m such an idiot in love (note blog name) and have never, ever, felt a connection like that. That thing where you feel someone instantly knows you? You’re really lucky.

  Reply: Honey-girl

  We’re not together any more, but He was special …

  3. Theo

  Theo Pope could recall the exact moment he knew his marriage was over. It was the night that Leah had phoned him with the news that Anna and a friend of hers were missing after an avalanche and two people from the ski party had already been confirmed dead. Harriet, his wife of twelve years, had been beside him, folding linen. Shock had registered on her face and she had made the right noises at the news, sympathetic sounds for Jess and her family. The pillowcases were folded into four, their creases pressed down with her palm; all the while, one eye had lingered on her BlackBerry. Theo had thought it odd; remote and detached from the unfolding tragedy.

  Johnny Mathis was singing about a child being born on the television. The Christmas tree lights that Theo had been fixing on his lap had fallen to the floor, some twinkling as expected, some stubbornly refusing. He had gone to Jess’s immediately, and when he got back after seeing her and her ex, Doug – both devastated beyond words, both readying to drive through the night to the tiny village in the Queyras area of the French Alps – he had heard Harriet on her phone. She was in the den at the back of the house, oblivious to the fact that he’d come home. He heard her whispered tone, her soft giggle. He imagined her on the other side of the door that he rested his forehead on. She would be sitting back, cross-legged, on the leather sofa. The phone would be in her left hand and she would be playing with her hair with her right; her forefinger rolling some strands of straight auburn hair, round and round itself.

  He had opened the oak-panelled door that Harriet had insisted on having two years earlier – a refurbishment plan in their home that he now knew was papering over the cracks. He hadn’t gone in, just stood there under the lintel, and she had looked up, her face frozen.

  ‘Enough,’ he had said. ‘No more of this. Go. Go be with him. I’m tired of all the subterfuge.’

  And she had. Two days later. Two weeks before Christmas. She had gone. To be with him.

  Ten weeks later, with February pelting biblical rain against the surgery windows, he gathered the papers he had been reading from his desk and slid them into his briefcase. The first patient of the Saturday morning surgery was due any moment, and he just had time to sit in his desk chair when a knock sounded on the door.

  ‘Come in,’ he said.

  Jess’s head peered around. ‘No, I’m not the scheduled Sarah Talbot. Sorry – I persuaded Sam in reception to let me in first. Perks of being an ex-employee. I’ll be quick, promise.’

  He beckoned her in, stood and kissed both her cheeks.

  ‘You’re soaked,’ he said.

  ‘Just from the car to the building, it’s fine.’ She sighed aloud. ‘I won’t beat around the bush,’ she said. ‘I need more of those tablets you gave me when … you know. I can’t sleep. And please, don’t lecture me on how addictive they might be. I have bad dreams, Theo. The snow comes to get her and then the sea comes to get me and—’

  ‘Slow down. Sit down, Jess.’ He pointed to the chair next to his desk.

  She sat. ‘I was going to say something yesterday but …’

  He nodded as he pulled her records up on his screen. ‘Jess, I’ll give you a scrip for seven days. That’s it. Make an appointment, come in and see me properly. If you don’t want it to be me, see Jane instead?’

  Jess nodded. ‘I will.’

  Theo looked at his friend: her eyes dark and tired; her hair, which yesterday had been tamed into a thick ponytail, a mass of unkempt wet waves today. He remembered she had refused food. ‘Are you even eating?’ he asked.

  ‘When I feed Rose. I eat. Really.’ She pointed at her wrist. ‘Mrs Talbot’s waiting. You’ll be late for everyone this morning.’

  ‘Yeah, well you knew that would happen when you sneaked in.’ He printed the prescription and handed it to her. ‘Come over tonight. Rose is away so you won’t eat at all. Come and have some dinner. I forgot to tell you that I finally got some help at home – we have an au pair and she can cook! Her name is Bea.’ He grinned.

  ‘Be?’ she asked.

  ‘Bea, spelt B E A, short for Beatrice. Swedish. Blonde. Gorgeous.’

  Jess frowned.

  ‘I’m kidding. She’s a Spanish brunette who makes a mean chicken casserole,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry.’ She folded the prescription and put it in her coat pocket. ‘I’m supposed to be at Leah’s. I bailed last night and Gus is determined to cook me a birthday meal.’ Her expression showed she’d rather miss it a second time. ‘I’m just not up for being nice to anyone. Not Leah and Gus, not you and Finn. The phone rings, I jump. I’m a wreck.’

  As if on cue, Theo’s desk phone trilled.

  ‘That’ll be because Mrs Talbot’s getting irate.’ Jess leapt up. ‘I’d better go. Thanks, Theo.’

  And then she was gone.

  The rest of the morning was so busy, he scarcely had time to breathe. Though he only covered one in four Saturday morning surgeries, lately he had come to almost resent them, feeling that he should be doing fatherly things with his son at the weekend. Finn was probably glued to his laptop, when he should be doing something with him. Something fun. Instead, a morning filled with children and their typical school holiday colds had made his own sinuses tighten.

  His eyes rested on the calendar on his desk. A present from Finn years ago, it was a wooden block where each date was displayed on a card. Above it, to the right, was a smaller card for the month and beside that, to the left, another card displaying the whole of the current year. He placed the correct date in the front. Saturday, 14 February 2015. A quick calculation told him it was ten weeks since his wife had left. Ten weeks since Anna went missing. Seventy days during which both he and Jess were beginning to learn how to navigate new lives.

  Harriet was now living in a flat close to her office in London, able to walk to the law firm where she’d worked for the last five years. Harriet was now making love to another man in another bed in another bedroom in that flat. Theo tried not to think about it, but when he did, that was the indelible image he saw. Her making love to someone else. Someone else hearing the way she would sigh quietly, then louder and louder until she finally let out a tiny whimper. He wondered if he hated Roland, her lover; if he hated Harriet, or if a tiny part of him was jealous of her freedom. Then he remembered F
inn. Finn was now the most important thing, and with his mother only visiting his life these days, Finn was proving to be a challenge.

  Theo pressed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, then lifted a gilt-framed photograph from his desk. One of the three of them skiing – but rather than think of his broken family unit, Anna came to mind. Where was she now? His stomach clenched as it always did when he thought of her. He couldn’t help but picture her entombed in frozen snow. He said a silent prayer he remembered from childhood; he prayed to faceless saints whose names he had long forgotten. During the early days, after the accident, he had prayed that Anna had seen that same documentary on television as him; the one that told you to spit at the snow’s surface to see which way was up or down. It would show the way out. She hadn’t come out, so his prayer, over time, had changed to one where he pleaded to the Gods to ensure that she hadn’t felt a thing.

  Anna. It was a moment before he realized he had said her name aloud.

  He opened the drawer to his left, reached in and searched with his fingertips until he felt them rest on the envelope at the back. Lifting it out, he sat back in his chair, his right forefinger circling his name in her handwriting. It was striking and bold, like her, and slightly slanted to the left. The ‘o’ on the end had a little tail, like a comma, sticking out the top. Theo. Panic rose in his throat and he pushed the letter back inside the drawer, for another day. Some other day.

  His patient rota finished, he’d had enough. Wrapping up against the outside elements, he lifted the briefcase. Checking inside one more time, he made sure he had the papers he needed to sign. Harriet had been efficient, her training managing to summarize their legal separation in a mere four pages.