Still nothing. Luca stared defiantly ahead, jaw set.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “God, I’m so sorry. I should’ve told you the truth.”
“You think?” He spoke finally, his voice flat. “You knew about Ryan! You knew about Ryan and you still told me that your mum died like it was some sort of joke to you.”
“No,” she said, and she hadn’t. She’d just let him draw his own conclusions the same way she’d let Maddie and Hunter—so that she didn’t have to talk about it. “I didn’t, Luca. It was you who put two and two together and came up with five, because that was what you wanted to believe.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You needed me to be like you, didn’t you?” she said. “You needed someone to understand what it feels like to lose someone you loved, and when I tried to tell you the truth, you didn’t want to hear it.”
Luca stared at her, face ashen. “How are you making this my fault? Hazel, if you really wanted me to know you’d have made me listen.”
“I know,” she said, desperate. “I know, all right? I should’ve told you from the start. I just thought it would be easier.”
“What, to have no mum rather than a sick one?” he said, and she could hear the change in his voice, the way his words had suddenly turned hollow. It had taken her months to break down his walls, and now here he was, building them back up right in front of her, shutting her out. “Jesus, Hazel! I’d give the world to have Ryan in a hospital instead of no Ryan at all!”
“That’s different,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like!”
“She’s alive!” he snapped. “How hard can it possibly be? She’s still here! You still have her!”
“I don’t!” she said furiously. She reached forward, palms flat on the ground to steady herself. “I don’t have her at all, Luca.”
“She’s in England, isn’t she?”
“Yes, but—”
“No,” he said. “No buts. If she’s alive, then you still have her.”
“Luca, she’s not sick the way you think! She doesn’t even know who I am. She’s got Alzheimer’s.”
“Alzheimer’s?”
Hazel just nodded, throat tight. “Early onset. She’s had it for years, but she got much worse last summer. One minute she was there, she was Mum, and the next … I was lucky if she recognized me once a week. I did everything I could to hold us together, but it wasn’t enough. None of it was enough.”
She lifted her head. Luca was watching her with guarded, careful eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, gently. “I just … I needed it too, you know? I needed someone to understand just as much as you did. I needed you, Luca.”
He shook his head like he didn’t believe her, like that was a lie, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t and she needed to make him understand, to make him get it.
“I’ve been writing to her since the day I arrived,” she said. “Every time I think of something worth remembering about her, about us, I write it down in a letter. All the good moments we had, even while she was sick. Even when they got rarer. I used to think I’d mail them, but then I realized there’d be no point; she’d have no idea who they were from. So they sit in my drawer. A whole drawer full of letters I’ll never send. A pile of shared memories only I remember.”
“Hazel—”
“She’s not dead, Luca,” she said, voice trembling. “But that doesn’t mean I haven’t lost her.”
He said nothing, eyes lowered back to the ground so he didn’t even have to look at her. They sat there for a moment in complete silence, Hazel fighting back tears.
“Will you at least go home?” she said. “Please? You don’t have to do it for me.”
Luca nodded once, curt. Hazel deflated with relief, standing up to give him space. He trailed behind her as she walked back across the track, never getting too close.
Red was waiting by the bikes, face set. As they drew closer, he unfolded his arms and stormed toward them.
“You idiot!” he spat, shoving Luca square in the chest. “You selfish little shit! What the hell were you thinking?”
“I just needed some space,” Luca muttered.
“You don’t get to do that to me!” Red said, shoving him again. “You don’t get to do it, Luc, not after last time! You scared me to death, you absolute moron!”
“Redleigh, I didn’t mean—”
“Just start walking.” Red cut him off, voice flat.
* * *
They walked home in silence, Hazel and Red in front, pushing their bikes, and Luca hanging back behind them. Hazel resisted the urge to keep turning and checking up on him; she didn’t know how she was going to fix this, what she could possibly do to make this right. The second they arrived back at the house, Luca went straight inside.
“You can sleep here if you like,” Red offered quietly.
“Are you sure?”
He nodded stiffly. They followed Luca wordlessly into the house and into the living room. Hazel sat on the edge of the sofa while Red went to get her a blanket and pillows.
“Here you go,” he said, handing them to her and turning to leave, but Hazel stopped him with a careful hand on his arm.
“Red?”
He turned back to her. “Yeah?”
“I really am sorry.”
“I’m not the one you should be apologizing to, Hazel.”
“He didn’t want to hear it.”
“Do you blame him?”
Hazel could feel tears prickling the back of her eyes. “No,” she whispered. “I don’t.”
“Look, Hazel. I don’t care that you weren’t honest,” he said. “I care that you weren’t honest with him. After everything he’s been through, he deserved more than that.”
“I know,” she said. “I know I should’ve told him everything, but I didn’t think I’d be around long enough for it to matter. And then when I was, I was scared if I told him the truth I’d lose him, and I just … I didn’t want him to have to be on his own anymore. I wanted him to know that he had someone.”
Red crossed the room and pulled her abruptly in for a hug, wrapping his arms around her and holding her fiercely until she finally relaxed and let herself hug him back. She buried her face in his chest.
“Thank you,” he murmured into her ear, and let her go. He paused in the doorway, framed by the light from the hall. “Sleep tight, Hazel.”
Dear Mum,
I remember. I remember it all, Mum, every single second. If only you did too.
45
When Red woke up later in the morning, Hazel had already left, her blanket and pillows arranged in a neat pile at the end of the sofa. He felt a stab of worry for her as he put them back in the closet, but he pushed it down. Luca was his number-one priority now.
After stopping by his room to find Hodgkins’s portfolio, Red went straight to the roof because he knew that was where Luca would be.
“I’m sorry,” Luca said.
“What for?”
“I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t … I didn’t think. I should’ve come home. I’m sorry.”
Red didn’t answer right away. He’d spent most of the early morning tossing and turning, trying to figure out what to say to him, how to get him to understand.
“You don’t know what it was like that night,” he said finally. “After Ryan’s funeral. Mum was distraught, and Dad was going out of his mind. We were all out searching the streets for you with flashlights. They phoned the police, but they couldn’t do anything because you’d only been gone a few hours. We tried to tell them that we knew something bad had happened, that we could just feel it.”
“Red—” Luca started to say, but his brother cut him off.
“No, wait. Let me finish.” There were tears in his eyes, unshed and glistening. “Do you remember how mad I was at you when you turned up the next morning? You looked so pathetic standing in the hallway with all your bruises and cuts and blood all over your shirt, but I was so pissed
at you. I hated you. I hated that you’d bottled up your pain instead of sharing it with me, and I hated that you’d handled your grief with such an obvious disregard for your own life. I hated that you’d let me stay up all night worrying myself sick wondering what happened to you. Because you know the one thing that was running through my mind that night? What runs through my mind every time you get in a fight? If he goes, I go.”
“Red,” Luca said again.
“That’s how it is,” Red said flatly. “That’s how I feel. Because you’re my twin, Luca, but you’re also my best friend and I really, sincerely, do not know what I would do without you.”
Luca dropped his gaze to his lap. “We’re nearly eighteen, Redleigh. It’s not your responsibility to worry about me all the time anymore.”
“Don’t be an idiot. You’re my brother—it’s always going to be my responsibility. So quit giving me things to worry about, all right?”
“It won’t happen again, I swear. I’m better than I was back then.”
“I know you are,” Red said, reaching over to squeeze his brother’s shoulder.
They sat in silence for a while. Red fixed his gaze on the sea. The view was something special, something so real and untouched and beautiful that it took his breath away. The world was a truly amazing place, even if it got hard sometimes to remember just how incredible it really was.
“Here,” Red said finally, holding out his art project. Since getting it back from Hodgkins, he’d continued adding new photos to the collection, building and growing it. “I think I’m ready to let you look at this. It’s that school assignment I was working on.”
Luca looked a little confused at the abrupt shift in conversation, but he nodded anyway and took the book. He flipped open to the first page, bearing just Red’s name and the project title: Family. He glanced up at Red, eyes questioning, and then turned the page.
The first picture was of their mum from that day in the kitchen after she and Red had talked about Luca’s scholarships, looking equally lovely and disheveled. My mother, the professional chef, the caption read. Stress-baking to distract herself from my brother’s impending self-destruction.
Luca exhaled and turned to the next page. Another picture, this one of Marc standing with Luca and Red on either side of him. An updated version of an old family picture hanging on the wall in the living room. In that one, Red and Luca were barely as high as their father’s waist; in this one, Marc was the shortest. Marc had his head tipped up slightly to look at Luca, who’d long outgrown him, staring at him like he was the sun.
The next few pages were filled with shots of Hazel, Maddie, and Hunter from the last five months, all in bright, beautiful color—inspired by Hodgkins’s reminder that family weren’t just the people who had raised you, but the people you cared about most. Hazel, Hunter, and Maddie, Red had written at the bottom. Best friends and honorary family members. Luca touched the page lightly with his fingertips and then turned to the final double spread.
This one was filled with pictures of him.
One from the night he twisted his ankle, middle finger up, and one from that night they shared a beer on the roof. Luca, doing homework at the kitchen counter. Luca with his face glowing orange from the flames of the campfire. Luca smiling, Luca laughing. A collage of Lucas. An entire collection of stolen moments of hope, of happiness.
Red knew what the caption said word for word; it was the one he’d spent the longest deliberating over: Luca Jayden Cawley. My twin brother, my other half, learning that life goes on.
When Luca finally looked up from the album, his eyes were wet. “Redleigh, this is—”
“Sappy?” he offered lightly.
He shook his head, closing the book and surveying the landscape in front of them. “Port Sheridan’s not so bad, huh?”
“It’s not,” Red agreed. He waited for a beat, before adding, “So you want to talk about it?”
“About what?”
Red just looked at him. “About Hazel, Luc.”
“It’s not about the stuff with her mum,” he muttered. “It’s really not. I wish she’d been honest with me, but only so that I could help her, you know?”
“What’s it about, then?”
Luca stared at his hands. “I just—I don’t understand why she’d want to go back there. She’s happy here.”
“I know,” Red agreed.
“She’s got her dad, she’s got friends, she’s got a lovely home, and she doesn’t have anything to worry about here. She’s got you.”
“And she’s got you.”
Luca’s cheeks flushed pink. “It doesn’t make sense. She’s built a life here, a good life, and she’d give it all up to go back there? To be with a mother who doesn’t even know who she is? What kind of a life is that?”
“The only one she’s ever known,” Red said simply. These past months Hazel might have been given a glimpse into the kind of life she could’ve had, but that was all Australia had ever been to her—a could’ve been. A version of her life that could’ve existed, but didn’t. She could’ve grown up here, her parents still together. She could’ve had a normal life. She could’ve had friends, and freedom, and a real family. She could’ve had help with her mum, a support system, someone to hold her while she cried.
But she hadn’t.
Red couldn’t fathom why Hazel would choose her life in England over the one she had with them here anymore than Luca could, but that was because they hadn’t lived it.
“What do I do, then?” Luca asked finally. “About Hazel? About everything?”
“Well, first off you remember that we love you, and we care, and we’re here to help,” Red said. “And then you remember that Hazel might have made a mistake, but that she’s hurting just as much as you are, if not more—at least with Ryan you had a clean break, but she can’t move on or put her mum in the past.”
Luca nodded slowly and then handed the portfolio back to his brother before scrambling to stand up. “I’ve got to leave,” he said. “Redleigh, I’ve got to fix this.”
“Go,” Red said, and Luca did.
46
The feel of the concrete underneath Luca’s feet as he began to run was soothing. There was a light wind in the air, a breeze coming inland from the ocean. It brought with it the salty smell of the sea. The smell of home. Home here in Port Sheridan, but home back in Sydney too. He felt a faint, familiar pang right in the center of his chest.
“Still missing you, buddy,” he murmured, but that was okay, that would be enough, because he remembered. All the wishing in the world wouldn’t bring Ryan back, but as long as Luca didn’t forget, he would never truly be gone, either. That was all that mattered, in the end.
He put his head down and pushed his legs farther, his feet faster, and eventually his mind started to clear. It’s okay, he told himself, although he knew it wasn’t strictly true, not even nearly. Then, more honestly, You’ll be all right.
He reached the end of Hazel’s road, her big white house looming in the distance. He slowed to a stop at the gate, suddenly dizzy with panic. Could he fix this? All this time Hazel had grounded and moored and saved him, and since yesterday everything had felt out of focus and blurred and wrong without her around.
Luca realized the dizziness was real, that he couldn’t quite catch his breath. He leaned forward on the gate, his chest heaving up and down, until he’d gotten himself together, and then he headed for the house. He didn’t let himself hesitate, just knocked quickly on the door.
It took a few seconds for Hazel to answer, but then she did and she was right there in the doorway, and everything came back into focus, sharp and clear and beautiful. “Luca?”
“Hey,” he said, giddy with relief.
She held on to the door. “I … hey.”
“I’m sorry,” he told her softly. “I’m so sorry about your mum and I’m sorry about what you had to go through and I’m sorry I wasn’t more supportive. You’ve been nothing but patient with me this entire ti
me, and you deserved the same.”
Hazel was on the edge of tears, her eyes shining. “Luca, I—I should’ve been honest with you. That’s on me, that’s not on you.”
“It’s on both of us,” he said firmly. “Can you forgive me?”
“Can you forgive me?”
Luca just smiled. “I already have.”
A flicker of a smile crossed her face. “I … missed you.”
“I missed you too,” he said, and she was so close, close enough that he could reach out and touch her. He wished he knew if that was still allowed. “I really, really want this to work. Do you think we can make this work?”
“It was supposed to be temporary,” she said. “All of it—Graham, school, you guys, it was never supposed to be something that would last. But that’s not what I want anymore.”
“What are you saying?”
She managed a watery half smile. “I’m going to stay here in Australia.”
“But what about England? What about your mum?”
Hazel took a deep, steadying breath and blew it out. “We’re going to try and bring her here. See if we can find her a place in a local nursing home so that she can be nearby and we can go and visit.”
“Hazel, that’s … that’s great! That’s great, isn’t it?”
“She’s sick, and she’s not going to get better, and that’s not great, that’s not okay, but I—I’m dealing with it.” She raised her head to meet his eyes. “I can’t fix everything. I don’t even want to try anymore. My life is far from perfect, but it’s mine, and I don’t want to waste it looking over my shoulder trying to undo what’s already been done. I have to move forward, Luca, and I really, really want to do that with you.”
“Hazel, I—I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. “I don’t know how to be everything you deserve. I only know how much better I am when you’re around.”
Hazel surged upward onto her tiptoes, throwing her arms around Luca’s neck and kissing him fiercely. He looped his arms around her waist and pulled her flush against him, holding her tight. Hazel felt something settle in her chest, the feeling that she was finally grounded, that she was finally home.
Don't Forget Me Page 22
