The Man Who Didn't Call

by Rosie Walsh

  ‘Dad funded it,’ he said. ‘Cash was his solution to everything, after he left us. He couldn’t bring himself to call, once Alex’s funeral was over, or to come and visit, but he was fine sending money. So I decided to be fine about spending it.’

  He told me about the day he’d discovered who I was. How the trees outside his barn had seemed to collapse in on him as he reframed me as Sarah Harrington, the girl who’d killed his sister. How he’d cancelled his holiday to Spain. Put his commissions on hold. How he’d gone to check on his mother one day and found her zonked out on medication, and the guilt he had felt as he had watched her sleep.

  ‘It would be catastrophic if she found out about me and you,’ he said quietly. ‘Although it felt pretty catastrophic even without her knowing. I fell into quite a hole. I didn’t look at Facebook, or emails, or anything. Just kind of cut myself off. Took a lot of walks. Did a lot of thinking and talking to myself.’

  He cracked his knuckles. ‘Until my mate Alan turned up to check if I was dead and told me you’d been in touch.’

  Then he sighed. ‘I should have replied to you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t. You were right – that’s no way to treat anyone. I started to write to you, again and again, but I just didn’t trust myself to talk to you.’

  I tried not to imagine what he might have said.

  ‘But I loved your life story. Your messages. I craved them when they didn’t come. I read them over and over.’

  I swallowed, trying not to attach meaning to this. ‘Did you ever call me?’ I asked tentatively.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Are you sure? I had . . . I had some dropped calls. And, well, a message, telling me to stay away from you.’

  He looked puzzled. ‘Oh. You wrote to me about that, didn’t you? In one of those letters? I’m sorry – I didn’t really pay it much attention. I think I just assumed you’d made it up.’

  I winced.

  ‘Did you hear from them again?’

  ‘No. But I did think . . . Look, I did wonder if it might be your mother. Is there any way she could have found out about you and me? I saw a woman, on the canal path between my parents’ house and your barn . . . And when I went to Tommy’s sports thing at my old school, I saw someone wearing the same coat. I mean, I can’t be certain it was the same person, but I’m pretty sure it was. She wasn’t doing anything particularly strange, but both times I felt like I was being, well, stared at. And maybe in a hostile way.’

  Eddie folded his arms. ‘That’s very odd,’ he said slowly. ‘But there’s absolutely no way it was Mum. She hasn’t the faintest clue about you. And anyway, she . . .’ He trailed off. ‘She’s just not capable of that sort of thing. Crank-calling, following people – that’s just way beyond her capabilities. She’d get super-stressed even thinking about doing something like that. In fact, she’d fall apart.’

  ‘And there’s nobody else it could have been?’

  Eddie looked utterly confused. ‘No,’ he said, and I believed him. ‘The only person I told was my best mate, Alan, and his wife, Gia. Oh, and Martin from football, because he also saw your post on my Facebook page. But all of them I told in confidence.’

  He leaned forward, his face knotted with concentration. He must have failed to get anywhere, though, because after a few minutes he shrugged and straightened up. ‘I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘But it wasn’t Mum. Of that you can be certain.’

  ‘OK.’ I slid off a flip-flop and tucked one foot up on my chair. Eddie was looking miserable again. He pressed a finger down onto the rim of his plate so it reared up like a flying saucer. He wheeled it left and right.

  ‘Why are you here, Eddie?’ I asked, eventually. ‘Why did you come?’

  He looked at me then. Looked at me fully, and my stomach pulled up into my throat.

  ‘I came because you messaged me saying you were going back to LA and I panicked. I was still angry, but I just couldn’t let you walk out of my life. Not until I’d spoken to you. Heard what you had to say. I knew Mum’s view couldn’t be the only view.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I booked a flight and emailed my mate Nathan to ask if I could crash at his place. Called my aunt and asked her to come and stay with Mum. It was like watching myself in the third person, really. I knew I shouldn’t come, but I couldn’t stop myself. And I couldn’t stop you, either: you were already on the plane when you emailed me.’

  But when he got here, he found himself paralysed. Three times he came to confront me; three times guilt over his sister sent him running back into the obscurity of the city. I slumped in my chair. Even talking to me felt like a betrayal.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about your past?’ he asked, when I signalled for the bill. ‘You told me so much about yourself. Why didn’t you ever mention what happened?’

  I pulled some cash out of my wallet. ‘I just don’t tell people, full stop. The last person I told was my friend Jenni, and that was seventeen years ago. If we . . . Had we . . .’ I cleared my throat. ‘If we had turned into a Thing, I would have told you. I nearly did, in fact, on the last night. But other things got in the way.’

  Eddie looked thoughtful. ‘Whereas I’m used to telling people. I often have to, because of Mum being so up and down. But that week with you just felt so different to anything else. I wasn’t Eddie, Carole’s son, the bloke who lost his sister and has to spend far too much time running around after his mum. I was me.’ He slid his phone back in his pocket. ‘For the first time in years, I didn’t think about the past. At all. Plus Mum had her sister with her, because I was about to go off to Spain, so I didn’t even need to think about her.’

  He stood up, giving me an odd smile. ‘Which is ironic, really, given who I was with.’

  I left a few dollars on the table and we walked down to the water’s edge. Wavelets furled silkily around our feet, drawing back into the boundless blue swell of the Pacific. The horizon boiled and shimmered, indistinct.

  I slipped my hand into my pocket. Mouse. I ran a thumb over her, one final time, before offering her over to Eddie on the palm of my hand.

  He stared at her for a long time. ‘I made her for Alex,’ he said. ‘For her second birthday. Mouse was the first decent thing I made out of wood.’

  With tenderness, he picked her up, holding her in front of his face, as if learning her shape once again. I imagined him chiselling away at this tiny lump of wood, maybe in his father’s garage, or simply at a kitchen table, and my heart broke. A round-faced little boy making a toy mouse for his baby sister.

  ‘Alex thought Mouse was a hedgehog, when she was a toddler. Only she couldn’t say “hedgehog” back then: it came out as “Ej-oj”. Made me laugh. I started calling her Hedgehog; it never quite wore off.’ He fitted her back onto his key ring and put it back in his pocket.

  I had run out of delaying tactics. The sea shifted in and out. Neither of us said anything.

  We watched herring gulls and sandpipers circling above a family picnic, and a wave tumbled in on us, faster than we could move back. His shorts got wet. My skirt got wet. We laughed, he lost his footing and nearly fell, and for a second I could smell him: his skin, his clean hair, his Eddie smell.

  ‘I’m going to fly back tomorrow,’ he said, eventually. ‘I’m glad we’ve had this conversation, but I’m not sure there’s anything else we can say. Or do, for that matter.’

  No, I thought hopelessly. No! You can’t walk away from us! It’s here! Our thing! It’s right here in the air between us!

  But nothing came out of my mouth, because it wasn’t my decision to make. I had driven a car carrying Alex into a tree and she had died, right there beside me. Time would not change that. Nothing would change that.

  He picked up my hands and uncurled my clenched fists. My nails left sad white crescents in my palms. ‘We could never go back to what we had the first time round,’ he said, smoothing his thumb across the nail marks, like a father rubbing a child’s cut knee. ‘It’s done. You do un
derstand that, Sarah, don’t you?’

  I nodded and made a face that suggested agreement, or perhaps resignation. He dropped my hands and looked off at the sea for a while. Then, without any warning at all, he bent down and kissed me.

  It took me a while to believe it was happening. That his face was pressed against mine, his mouth, his warmth, his breath, just like I’d imagined a hundred times over. For a few seconds I was perfectly still. But then I started kissing him back, elated, and he wrapped his arms tightly around me, like he had the first time. He kissed me harder, and I kissed him back, and the wheeling gulls and shrieking children were gone.

  But as I began to let go completely, he stopped, resting his chin on my head. I could hear his breath, fast and unsteady.

  Then: ‘Goodbye, Sarah,’ he said. ‘Take good care of yourself.’

  His arms released me and he was gone.

  I watched him walk away, my hands dangling by my sides. Further and further away he walked. Further and further away.

  It wasn’t until he was back up on the boardwalk that I said out loud the thing I’d been unable to say before now, not even to myself.

  ‘I’m pregnant, Eddie,’ I said, and my words were carried away by the wind, just like I wanted them to be.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  I laid a hand on my belly. I am pregnant. I am carrying a baby .

  Jenni was telling Javier about a Slovenian genetics researcher she’d met in the waiting room at the acupuncture clinic yesterday. Javier was listening attentively to his wife while keeping a keen ear on the lady dispensing orders at the counter. The last number she’d called had been eighty-four. Our ticket, curled between Javier’s fingers, said eighty-seven.

  I imagined cells multiplying, all those weeks ago. Sarah cells, Eddie cells. Sarah-and-Eddie cells, splitting into more Sarah-and-Eddie cells. The Internet said it would be the size of a strawberry by now. There was a computer-generated picture on the page, and it looked like a tiny child. I’d stared at that picture for what seemed like hours, and felt things I had never felt before, things to which I couldn’t even put a name.

  I am nine weeks pregnant.

  But we’d been careful! Each and every time! And how could I be pregnant when I was three pounds lighter?

  ‘You told me yourself you’ve struggled to eat,’ the doctor had said patiently. ‘Weight loss is not uncommon with morning sickness.’

  Nausea. Fatigue. Tumbling hormones, food aversions, a brain packed with thick fog. The real surprise, I supposed, was not so much that I was pregnant but that I had failed to spot so many obvious markers.

  A parcel had arrived for me this morning. I’d been lying in bed, filling in the paperwork for my scan, and had felt so dislocated from reality that for a moment I had wondered quite seriously if it might be Eddie. Eddie, curled up inside a box, ready to spring out, shouting, ‘I’ve changed my mind! Of course I want to be with you – the woman who killed my little sister! Let’s start a family!’

  Instead I had unwrapped a toy sheep, with little leather hooves and a wool coat, and a note round its neck saying – in Eddie’s handwriting – LUCY . There had been a letter, too, in an envelope that smelled oddly of sherbet. I took it outside.

  On Jenni’s deck, I curled myself into a chair and stared at the dirty jumble of air-conditioning units and satellite dishes stretching out below me. I ran my fingertips along the tiny indentations that Eddie’s pen had left where he’d written my name. I knew what this letter would be. It would be the final punctuation mark to a relationship that had ended nineteen years before it had even begun, but I wanted a few more minutes before I saw that final full stop. A few more minutes of precious, poisonous denial.

  I watched a cat for a while. The cat had watched me. I’d breathed the slow, steady breaths of someone who knows the drama is over, who knows herself to be truly beaten. When the cat had marched off disdainfully, tail in the air, I’d slid my thumb into the gap at the top of the envelope.

  Dear Sarah,

  Thanks for your honesty yesterday. It was very comforting to know that Alex was happy that day.

  I want to say everything’s fine, but it’s not, nor can it be. For that reason I think it best we don’t stay in touch – it would be too confusing to be friends. I do wish you well, though, Sarah Harrington, and will always remember the time we had together. It meant everything to me.

  What a terrible coincidence, eh? Of all the people in the world.

  Anyway, I wanted to send a little something to make you smile. I know how rough this whole thing has been for you, too.

  Be happy, Sarah, and take care,

  Eddie

  I read the note three times before folding it back into its envelope.

  Be happy, Sarah, and take care.

  I’d leaned my head back against the outside of Jenni’s bungalow and stared at the sky. It was milky and expectant up there, smudged with clouds the colour of Turkish delight. A sweep of birds passed high above, and, beyond them, a plane on its ascent.

  I hadn’t told Jenni about the baby. I couldn’t bear it; couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I’d got pregnant while using birth control, when for more than ten years she had put every scrap of her emotional, physical and financial resources into creating a family of her own.

  I’d stared at my abdomen, trying to imagine the tiny beginnings of a person in there, and felt an odd sensation in my heart, like my chest was being compressed. Was that pleasure? Or panic? It had its own heart now, the doctor told me. In spite of the poor nutrition, the wine and the stress I’d fed it. It had its own tiny heart that was beating twice as fast as my own, and I would see it on a scan tomorrow afternoon .

  I stared at the sky. Was he up there already? Still waiting at the gate to board? I half rose out of my chair. I had to go to the airport. Find him. Stop him. For the sake of this baby I had to talk him round, convince him that I—

  What? That I wasn’t Sarah Harrington? That I hadn’t driven his sister into a tree that day?

  I’d sat there, drumming my fingers on my thighs, until Javier had let Frappuccino out into the yard and the dog peed on my leg. I’d started laughing, and then crying, wondering how I could possibly have a baby when I’d spent my whole adult life avoiding children. Wondering how I could bring anyone into the world, knowing the father wanted nothing to do with me. Yet somehow knowing that it was already too late to turn back. That I wanted this baby in ways I didn’t even understand.

  I continued in this vein for hours. Jenni, when she finally got out of bed, tried to look after me, but she had nothing left to give. We spent two hours sitting together in grim silence.

  When Javier was unable to bear the emotional potency a moment longer, he offered to drive us all up to Neptune’s Net in Malibu – a bikers’ cafe – for fried fish. It was his solution to all serious problems. He had hunched over the wheel as he’d motored up the coast, although whether to speed us on towards the comfort of food or to protect himself from all the messy feelings surrounding him, I didn’t know.

  And now here we were, jammed like sardines into a booth. The restaurant was packed. Every table was full, and the entrance was packed with people waiting for a seat. We, the seated, ignored them. They, the standing, stared determinedly at us. Music was drowned out by the deafening roar of conversation, Harley-Davidsons revving outside and the furious sizzle of that morning’s catch hitting boiling oil. It was a big, long motorbike ride away from calm, but, in some small way, it was working.

  ‘Eighty-seven!’ called the lady at the counter, and Javier sprang up, shouting, in a voice hoarse with relief, ‘Sí! Sí! ’

  Jenni seldom acknowledged her husband’s limited emotional capacity, but today, just for me, she allowed herself a quick eye roll. Then she fixed me with one of her looks and asked me what I was going to do about Eddie.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing I can do, Jenni. You know it. I know it. Even Javier knows it.’

  Javier silently placed
a seafood basket between us, handing Jenni a Sprite and me a Mountain Dew. Then, letting out a quiet but perfectly audible sigh of relief, he turned to his own pile of shrimp tacos, pale-battered calamari and cheesy chilli fries, knowing it would be some time before he might be expected to contribute.

  ‘He really left no doors open? Not even a glimmer of hope?’

  ‘Not so much as a dust mote,’ I said. ‘Look, Jenni, I’m going to say this one last time. Imagine it was your sister, Nancy. Imagine that a man drove lovely Nancy into a tree. Would you contemplate a relationship with him? Would you really ?’

  Jenni put down her cutlery, defeated.

  ‘Ninety-four!’ yelled the woman at the counter.

  I speared a scallop.

  Then: Should I be eating this? I wondered suddenly. I was sure I’d seen pregnant friends avoiding shellfish. I looked at the meal in front of me. Seafood, shellfish and a large glass of Mountain Dew. Wasn’t caffeine banned, too?

  Yet again, the tectonic plates of my life shifted underneath me. I am nine weeks pregnant .

  ‘Here,’ Jenni said heavily. ‘Take some scallops before I eat it all, Sarah. I’m sensing another binge coming on.’

  I declined.

  ‘But you love scallops.’

  ‘I know . . . I’m not feeling the love today, though.’

  ‘Seriously? Well, at least have some of this blue-cheese dip for your fries. I think it’s actually real cheese. It’s good.’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine with ketchup. You have it.’

  Jenni laughed. ‘Sarah Mackey, you detest ketchup. No scallops, no blue cheese – anyone’d think you were pregnant. Look, please don’t try to starve yourself, honey. It won’t help anything, and besides, life is totally miserable without food.’

  I laughed, a little too loudly. Picked up a scallop to prove that I was fine, and certainly not pregnant, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make myself eat the stupid thing. I had a baby the size of a strawberry growing in me, a baby I’d neither planned nor asked for, but still I couldn’t eat the scallop. The edge of a frown crossed Jenni’s face.