The Book of Second Chances

by Katherine Slee

  The scent of summer rain hung in the air, and church bells called out the hour as Emily came to a halt at the edge of the path that led to her home. Propped up against the garden gate was a young man wearing oxblood cowboy boots, a tan leather jacket, frayed jeans, with a guitar looped over one shoulder. The same man who, as a boy, had been too afraid to duck his head under the water on their shared holidays, the boy she had eventually teased and cajoled into jumping from the jetty into the icy blue.

  “Tyler,” she whispered as she watched him lift his head and smile as she approached.

  5

  PELICAN

  Pelecanus

  He was in her kitchen, opening and closing cupboards, helping himself to some ham and cheese from the fridge as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to be there, with her.

  Tyler was now perched on the end of the table, where her discarded breakfast and sketchbook still lay, chatting to her about how sorry he was not to have made the funeral, that he always loved how chaotic and free Aunt Cat was.

  Was, thought Emily.

  “So, are you all packed?”

  Emily looked over to see Tyler wiping at the corner of his mouth with a linen napkin, the edge of which was embroidered with tiny stars. The last time she had seen him was at her twenty-first birthday. A mismatched gathering of lost souls who were connected to her somehow, yet none of them had seemed to know her at all. He had been out in the garden, over by one of the apple trees, smoking a cigarette and frowning at the vicar as he tried to explain the merits of cross-country skiing.

  “Packed?” she asked, hating the way her tongue got caught around the middle letters. It didn’t matter that she had known Tyler all her life, nor that he understood where her speech impediment had come from. The blush on her cheek was just as embarrassing as always.

  “The train leaves in just over an hour,” he replied, opening the biscuit tin and peering inside before taking out a handful of custard creams. “I assumed you’d be ready?”

  Emily gave a shake of her head, eyes darting around the kitchen as if somewhere was hidden a clue, a hint, as to what he was talking about. The bookseller had said she would know, that she would understand.

  Surely not, Emily thought as she began to pace around the room, looking over at Tyler, then across at the clock hanging above the sink, then back at Tyler again.

  Although sending a chaperone would be exactly the kind of thing her grandmother would do. Her way of ensuring Emily would go through with the task at hand and not hide away under the cover of ignorance. Just like sending that man and his Dalmatian, she had decided to send Tyler. But what Emily couldn’t figure out was, of all people, why him?

  “No, as in you’re not packed?” Tyler asked as he watched Emily’s frantic pacing. “Or no, you’re not coming?”

  Emily stopped. She leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes. She was no longer a child in a wheelchair who needed doctors and adults to decide what was best. Now she was a grown woman, yet apparently still deemed incapable of making her own choices.

  Tyler kept talking as she escaped into her grandmother’s study. He followed her into the small, dark space that was dominated by a wall of books and a mahogany desk by the back window where an old-fashioned typewriter sat neatly in the middle. Emily approached it and tapped a steady beat of two keys, which she struck over and over. Tyler came up to peer over her shoulder.

  “NONONONONONONONONONONONON…” he read out loud, and Emily turned around to face him. She opened her mouth as if to speak, then realized she had completely forgotten whatever it was she was about to say, or even if she had intended to speak at all.

  Images swam in her mind; memories she did not want to recall, including one of the way he had looked at her the first time they met after the accident. With a mixture of fear and pity, he’d clearly tried not to stare at the huge gash across one side of her face, or the metal structure which held her skull together but also prevented her from speaking. At the wheelchair that held her captive while her spine tried to heal. She remembered how he had stood, half hidden behind his mother, hands shoved deep in pockets and one foot scuffing the ground. Then he had turned and ran to the other end of his garden, scaled the ladder hanging from a low-slung branch, up into a treehouse where the two of them used to play as kids, and refused to come down, even when called in for supper.

  Emily knew how hard it was for anyone to look upon her, strapped into a chair with a face contorted and bruised. She had known it every day since, even when her body had healed, her scars faded to silvery pink. She knew he could still see her the way she used to be, before the accident, and part of her hated him for it.

  “You can’t stay here, Emily.” Tyler placed a hand on her shoulder, only for her to swat him away. “Mum told me that Aunt Cat’s instructions were really specific.”

  “She knew?” Emily grappled with the words and idea all at once. To think that Tyler’s mother, her own godmother, had known of her grandmother’s intentions yet said nothing.

  “Well, yes, of course she did.” Tyler frowned, then gave a small shake of his head as he saw the way Emily’s fists were clenched tight and her shoulders raised. “But you didn’t, did you?”

  He sank into the desk chair, picked up a glass paperweight in the shape of an apple, then put it back down again.

  “I know what you’re thinking.” He started to sway back and forth on the chair, opened one drawer, then closed it again. “And, yes, you’re right. I didn’t come here out of my own free will. Call it a favor, of sorts.”

  Emily looked at him with raised eyebrows and crossed her arms.

  “The thing is, I need this trip as much as you do. So, why not call a truce? Help each other out?”

  Emily laughed at how revoltingly obnoxious he was, then turned to walk out of the room, but she felt his hand on her arm, asking her to stay. Instinctively, she wanted to pull free, but something stopped her. She considered the weight of him on her, the warmth spreading from skin to skin. And then up to the dusting of freckles across his cheeks, half hidden by stubble.

  “No.” Emily stomped up the stairs, heard him call out after her.

  “There is something else,” he said.

  She paused on the landing.

  “I have a letter. From your grandmother. Only I’m not allowed to give it to you until we’re on the train. Which, by the way, leaves in fifty-five minutes.”

  Emily slammed the door to shut him out, sank onto her bed, and stared out of the window to the garden beyond.

  A letter. Another clue? She had to consider her options. Could she steal it from him? Negate the need to even leave the house? Only she didn’t know where the letter was hidden; perhaps in his guitar case, or his pocket?

  She rolled over and looked under the bed, saw nothing more than a pair of moccasin slippers she never wore, even on the coldest days. No suitcase, but then again she couldn’t remember the last time she had needed to pack an overnight bag, nor indeed if she even owned one.

  Out onto the landing she went, then pushed the door to her grandmother’s room wide, a line of sunlight cutting the space in two. The bed was stripped of all linens, but there remained a hand-stitched quilt folded at its foot. In her last few months, even when the evenings remained bright and warm, Catriona had needed the extra layer. Emily had often sat with her, reading aloud until she fell asleep, the role of adult and child reversed.

  Emily wandered over to the bed, then lay on top of the mattress that dipped in the middle, pulled the quilt over her shoulders, closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of lavender that used to follow her grandmother wherever she went.

  She hadn’t been in the room for weeks, not since emptying the contents of her grandmother’s wardrobe and nightstand. She’d sorted through what could go to charity and what held too many memories to throw away, including a vintage compact and lipstick case, a music box with filigree key, and a carriage clock that chimed out each hour.

  Other i
tems Emily had never seen before, but held the suggestion of her grandmother’s past—items that Catriona apparently couldn’t bear to part with, instead hiding them at the back of her wardrobe for so many years. There was a pair of handmade velvet shoes, the soles worn thin, that made Emily think of nights dancing in the arms of a handsome man in uniform while the band played on. A copy of A Room with a View, tucked inside of which was a crumbling rose, its petals papery and flattened by time, and a photograph in a tarnished silver frame, of her grandmother as a baby held in her mother’s arms, wrapped up tight against the bitter Scottish winter.

  Emily had carefully wrapped each item in between thin layers of tissue paper, placed them inside a cardboard box, and then made a list of absolutely everything her grandmother had possessed in a notebook, in the hope that she might not forget a single thing.

  Except there was so much she still didn’t know. Emily rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling, watched a spider spinning its web in the corner above the wardrobe, on top of which was a battered yellow suitcase. The same suitcase her grandmother said she had taken with her all over Europe, when Emily’s mother was just a baby herself.

  Where did they go? Emily wondered, because she couldn’t remember the names of all the places her mother had been taken as Catriona Robinson went in search of inspiration and adventure. She knew only how her mother had said she much preferred being at home, with her family. She had always told Emily she had no need of adventure when her entire world was right there in front of her.

  There was so much more she hadn’t been told, and Emily realized she had been too foolish to ever ask. It was as if Catriona had deliberately kept her past a secret because she knew one day it would come in handy.

  So many secrets all tangled up together, or perhaps it had simply been too painful for her grandmother to remember. They had hardly ever spoken about her parents since their deaths. Even now, Emily felt her mind shut down whenever she thought back to before the accident. During her recovery, she had been told to focus on the present, to take one day at a time, and her grandmother always said looking back brought nothing but regret, which itself was just a waste of emotion.

  Emily sat up and pushed the quilt away. Climbing onto the chest of drawers, Emily stretched up to grasp hold of the battered yellow suitcase, tossed it onto the bed, and opened it wide to discover a porcelain figure of a pelican. The very end of its beak was missing, but its eyes were still painted bright blue.

  “Hello,” she whispered to the bird, running her finger over the three holes in its head as she wandered back downstairs, the suitcase held tightly in one hand.

  Tyler sat at the kitchen table, scrolling through his phone. He stood up as she entered the room, upending his chair, and the resounding crash bounced around the silence that hung between them.

  “Changed your mind?” He gestured at the suitcase.

  Emily shook her head as she dropped it by the fridge, then reached up to take another porcelain bird down from the shelf next to the sink. This pelican had just one hole in its head and thin little eyelashes surrounding its blue eyes. Emily stood the pair together on the window ledge, beak to beak, and tried to remember where they had come from.

  “Hoopla,” Tyler said as he picked up the fallen chair, placed his dirty plate in the sink, and looked at the salt-and-pepper-pot birds.

  “’Oopla?” Emily replied, clenching her jaw in irritation at the lost consonant.

  “Don’t you remember? The fair on the Common?” Tyler turned on the tap, squeezed some washing-up liquid into the sink, and swirled his hand through the growing mountain of bubbles.

  We went every year, Emily thought, watching tiny rainbows appear in each perfect sphere, and pretended not to notice how comfortable Tyler was in her presence, how easily he had slotted himself into her day. It was like some sort of bad joke, her past appearing out of nowhere and carrying on as if nothing had happened over the intervening years.

  “It was the one thing I could beat you at,” Tyler said as he flicked bubbles at her and she turned away so he wouldn’t see her blush. “Your aim was terrible.”

  But Tyler had given her the prize anyway, handing the birds over with a deep bow, then lifting his head to reveal a wide grin as she stomped her foot and pretended to be mad.

  It was the same every year, the fairground that seemed to appear overnight, with bumper cars, candy floss, and row upon row of stalls with brightly colored lights, enticing you in, asking you to try your luck and win a prize.

  The birds had been carried home in the pocket of her pinafore dress, each step bringing with it a corresponding ting of china that made her stop every so often to check neither of them was broken. Salt and pepper pots that stood proudly on the kitchen table of a house that once was her home, used every time she and her parents sat down for tea. Emily’s mother would tell her husband off for covering his food with pepper before he’d even taken a mouthful. He would respond with a shrug and a wink at his daughter, then deliberately add some more.

  Emily wandered into the living room, sank down into the chair by the fire, and looked around at all the knickknacks her grandmother had collected over the years. Emily now realized she had no idea where they came from, what the significance of keeping them was.

  Did she hide the pelican on purpose? she asked herself, taking out the newly returned fountain pen from her pocket and turning it through her fingers. But why?

  Everything was done for a reason, as far as Catriona Robinson was concerned, especially when it came to her treasure hunts. Every clue, every stepping stone to the next part of the adventure, was carefully and meticulously planned, just like the books that she wrote. Nothing was left to chance, and Emily was beginning to realize that this call from the grave, this test, was no different.

  “Bit warm for a fire, isn’t it?” Tyler stood in the doorway, drying his hands on a tea towel as he looked over at the stacks of letters next to the fire.

  “I was…” She was going to burn them. All those individual messages of kindness that didn’t belong to her.

  Tyler went over to the fireplace, picked up a handful of letters, and collapsed onto the sofa by the window. Part of her wanted to snatch them back, to tell him to keep his hands off things that didn’t belong to him, but instead she found herself sitting forward on the chair, watching him as he read. He tugged at the collar of his shirt and in doing so revealed to her a thin silver scar across the back of his left hand. A scar she, in part, was responsible for.

  She was always making him do things he didn’t want to do, such as climb over a fence to explore the garden of the creepy old woman who lived next door, just to find out whether she was, in fact, a witch as Emily so believed. Tyler had tripped over a tree root and cut his hand open on a broken pot, but he had refused to tell his parents where they had been, or whose idea it was to go off exploring in the first place.

  Is this why you sent him? Emily thought as he looked up at her and she saw a shadow of the boy he used to be.

  “I don’t blame you for wanting to get rid of them.” He tossed the letters aside and stretched out on the sofa, hands behind his head in a pose of utter relaxation. “What is it like?” He turned his head toward her. “To have all those people asking something of you, wanting to know about you and Aunt Cat?”

  All Emily could muster was a sigh and a shrug.

  “She wouldn’t make you do any of this without good reason,” he said.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Seriously, Em. I’ve never known you to turn down a challenge before.”

  Except she had been a different person back then, someone she barely remembered.

  “What will you do instead? Where will you go when this place is sold?” Tyler eased off his boots and Emily smiled when she saw that, even as a grown man, he still wore mismatched socks.

  “The one decent piece of advice my dad ever gave me was ‘don’t quit until you’re done.’”

  “I don’t un…” Emily’s tongue
got trapped trying to sound out the letter “d” and she pushed herself up from her chair, strode back into the kitchen and out to the garden, where she stared up at the sky. She stood, head tilted back as she scanned the various shades of blue, picked out a couple of swallows that were on the hunt for their supper and followed them until they dipped and turned too far for her to see. She heard Tyler come up behind her, felt him take a breath, and could imagine him deciding whether or not to reach out and place a hand on her shoulder.

  “Don’t let this…quest, or whatever you want to call it, decide. Make sure you decide when to stop.”

  He was right, but that didn’t make it any easier to digest the enormity of what he was asking—of what everyone seemed to be asking—her to do.

  “I can’t,” she said, daring a look at him. For as long as she could remember, she had wanted to be left alone, for no one to ask her about her scar, or her silence. But here he was throwing up reminders of what her life used to be like and, as much as it irritated her, she was grateful she wasn’t being left to deal with things by herself.

  He regarded her a moment, then scratched the back of his head in a gesture so familiar, Emily felt as if she’d been thrown back to fifteen years earlier, when they were both nothing more than gangly, insecure teenagers.

  “I’m hungry,” Tyler said with a yawn. “And pretty knackered too. So here’s my suggestion. We eat.” He took out his phone and started scrolling down the screen. “Surely even out here we can get a delivery. You still like spicy food?”

  Emily nodded as she bent down to pull up a stray weed from in amongst the rosebushes. It made her think of the crushed rose her grandmother had kept, made her wonder if someone special had once given it to her and, if so, why Catriona had never spoken about them.

  “Done. Should be here in half an hour.” Tyler shoved his hands in his pockets, rocked back and forth on his heels as he looked over at Emily, then around the garden. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll crash here tonight as it’s too late to head back to town.”