The Book of Second Chances

by Katherine Slee

  “Are you drawing me?” Tyler opened one eye to accuse her, then dropped his head back against the seat.

  “In a way,” Emily replied, the words coming out more easily because he wasn’t watching. Her sketchbook was still inside the front pocket of her suitcase. She hadn’t been able to draw anything since leaving home. Something was stopping her, but she wasn’t yet sure what it could be. So instead she had been watching, storing up all the images she wanted to collect for later, when she was ready to start again.

  The space around him blurred as she assessed every part of his face. As always, the real world slipped away as she gave in to the images forming inside her head.

  What would life have dealt her instead if that one day had been different?

  It was an impossible question to answer; one Emily had tried, unsuccessfully, not to think about. But now she found herself also considering what could have been for her grandmother, if she had stayed in Scotland, done what was expected of her, instead of traveling across this same stretch of sea, long before it was commonplace to do so, before women were given such freedoms as to be able to live alone in a bookstore in Paris.

  Is that why you chose him? Emily thought as she watched Tyler sleep. Because he somehow reminded her grandmother of Noah?

  Noah. It was the name of a man she had never heard her grandmother mention. He was clearly someone who had made a remarkable impression on a young Catriona, along with the four other people mentioned in her diary. But Emily only knew who two of them were.

  Charlotte, or Charlie, as Emily called her, was her grandmother’s editor: the dear friend who stumbled across the story of Ophelia and Terence when she came to visit one spring night. She saw the potential, convinced Catriona to try to publish it. To put aside the adult fiction she had toiled with for over twenty years. A woman who fought for Emily’s drawings to be part of the very first publishing deal they both signed. She had been there for every book, every tour, every proposal, and always understood their need for privacy, despite the whole world begging for more.

  Did she know? Emily wondered. Is she a part of this too?

  But that made no sense, because Charlie had called only yesterday, asking once again if Emily knew anything about the existence of a new manuscript. If the rumors swirling around the newspapers were true.

  Charlie down. Four more to go.

  Gigi had to be Virginia, with whom Catriona traveled across Europe. The person who had bought her closest friend, the sister she never had, a locket when they parted ways. Emily wore the same locket around her neck, inside of which was a photograph of the two young women, taken somewhere in Rome. Two young women with the rest of their lives ahead of them, but who had met again only a handful of times before Gigi died, which was long before Emily was even born.

  So not her either. Which left just three, but for the moment it was Noah she wanted to know more about. Because the dates matched. The dates from the diary entries were just under two years before Emily’s mother was born. And Catriona had never told, never revealed, who the father was.

  Could it be that the secret, the mystery, her grandmother hinted at before she died had nothing to do with the manuscript after all? Could it be that Emily was being sent to find her grandfather, wherever he may be?

  “Seriously.” Tyler sat up and yawned once more. “Stop staring at me. It’s making me nervous, all that thinking you do.” He stood, stretched his arms high, revealing a line of skin between T-shirt and jeans.

  “I’m going outside for a smoke,” he said with a grin. “You coming?”

  Outside, the morning sky was inky, thick with damp and the promise of more rain. Emily followed Tyler to the back of the ferry, leant over to watch the trails of frothing sea that stretched all the way back to England. Overhead, a gaggle of seagulls flew, every so often pitching down to grab at a fish upset by the boat’s engines.

  Back home, more often than not, Emily would sit at her bedroom window, staring up at the sky and counting all the birds that flew through the blue. More and more, she would think about that freedom, that sensation of tilting up and over the ever-changing seasons. Of going wherever the wind took you, never staying in one place for too long.

  Now she looked at the seagulls, always on the wing, always searching for food, and felt sorry for them in a way she couldn’t quite explain. As if the freedom she perceived was in fact false, that they were tied to this world by the same rope as she.

  Seagulls can drink salt water. Emily watched one bobbing along the surface of the sea. Just the same as they did off the Norfolk coast. They’re clever too, using breadcrumbs stolen from humans to attract fish, and tapping on the ground with their feet to make worms think there’s rain up above, tricking them to the surface. They’re survivors.

  “What’s that?” Tyler nodded at the envelope Emily was fingering, one of its corners beginning to fray.

  “Her diary.” Emily found herself handing it over to him and wondered how she would feel if he used his cigarette to set it on fire, or simply tossed it out to sea.

  “You’ve never seen it before?” he asked, opening the lip and peering inside.

  “Nope.” Emily had had no idea her grandmother had even kept a diary. There had been nothing in the cottage, which meant Catriona must have moved it before she died.

  When had it all been planned? Emily had been so wrapped up in her own day-to-day, along with trying not to think about how frail her grandmother was, how much she was slowly slipping away, to notice what she was really up to.

  “And you don’t mind me reading it?”

  Emily tilted her head to the heavens, shut her eyes and sucked in great lungfuls of salty air. “Knock yourself out.”

  “Maybe later.” She heard him give a low chuckle, then the shift of foot and quiet rustle of paper. She imagined him tucking the envelope into the back pocket of his jeans, thought of reaching in her hand to check.

  “You’re rather chatty this morning.”

  “So?”

  A pause, followed by a slow exhale. “What’s changed?”

  Emily shrugged. She herself didn’t know. Perhaps it was the very fact she was somewhere else, with someone else. Heading toward a place she had not been since she was a child. So many changes in the space of so little time.

  “May I?” she asked, pointing at the headphones draped around his neck. They were the one thing she had forgotten to bring, the one item she should have made a point of putting in her suitcase but which she knew still hung off the back of the chair in the kitchen.

  “Sure.” There was an unspoken curiosity on his face, but his upbringing, all that private education and those lessons in etiquette, seemed to be telling him not to pry.

  “I want to draw,” she said, gesturing over to where a single seagull was perched on the railing, regarding them with eyes like marbles, his long, orange beak curved open.

  She wanted nothing more than to draw something familiar, something that had nothing to do with the search. The escapism of drawing a magnificent seagull standing so proud and cocky on deck, waiting to snatch a sandwich from an unsuspecting hand. Like the urban fox of the sea.

  “And you need music for that because?”

  He was fishing. She knew, and he knew, that the question was loaded with so much more.

  Emily considered him for a moment as she took a scrap of paper and her fountain pen from her pocket, considered whether or not he was someone to trust. He was still a stranger, no matter how many times they had pretended to be wizards, or spies, or dinosaur hunters when they were children.

  Emily went over to sit on one of the plastic benches screwed to the deck, lay the paper flat on her lap, then dipped her head so he couldn’t see her mouth as she spoke.

  “She typed with her eyes shut.”

  Emily could still see her, sat at her desk, eyes like narrow slits, fingers bashing away at that monster of a machine. Words spewing onto the paper like liquid letters that were simply waiting to be released from her
mind. As always, Emily would be next to her, sketchbook on her lap and pen at the ready, filled with black ink.

  “Go on.”

  Emily wiggled her jaw, felt the stretch along her scar, sensed the words that were waiting for her to speak, waiting for her to stop caring how long it took.

  “She always said it stopped the doubts.”

  “And the same thing happens when you listen to music?”

  “In a way.” The pictures always had a way of creating themselves and, by drawing in ink, it meant she couldn’t change her mind, couldn’t undo any so-called mistakes that were really meant to be.

  That came before. To block out all the noises of a world she no longer wanted to be a part of.

  It began when her speech therapist back at the clinic in Switzerland had played the piano. When Emily was having a particularly lengthy meltdown, tipping herself out of her wheelchair and lying on the floor, smacking her fists into the carpet and screaming at everyone. She remembered wishing she had the words to make them see that all she wanted was for them to leave her alone, to stop staring, to stop trying to fix her.

  Her grandmother had tried to console her, but all she had done was lash out, shouted even louder. The therapist had ignored Emily, walked over to the piano and sat down to play. At first, the notes hadn’t penetrated, hadn’t found their way through the fog that still hung inside her mind, the ear that refused to heal because the nerves were too busy torturing her with pain. But then, as the therapist continued to play, the space all around her seemed to vibrate, to slowly trickle over to where Emily lay.

  And just like that, the screams inside her head were stilled. All the images she did not want to see, and the frustrations she could not overcome, were forced away by those beautiful melodies.

  From that moment on, whenever Emily became restless, or overcome with feeling, she would go into the room that looked over the lake and sit with headphones on, volume turned up. She would sit, calmly drawing all the monsters and demons that would not leave her be. She simply put them down onto paper, then threw them all away.

  Emily looked down to see she had been busy drawing the face of someone she once knew: the therapist who pulled her from her darkness and showed her another way.

  “Who is she?” Tyler asked as he looked at the drawing.

  “Beth. Psyc…” Emily stopped as her tongue got caught on the word. “Shrink,” she said, tracing over the lines she had drawn, remembering the way that Beth’s mouth would curl up a little more on one side when she smiled. The tortoiseshell spectacles she wore on a chain around her neck, and the earrings made from Venetian glass she once told Emily were a gift from a dear, dear friend.

  “What was it like?” Tyler asked as he flicked the butt of his cigarette overboard.

  He meant after the accident, when Emily woke up and discovered her world had been split into a million tiny pieces and there was no way she could ever hope to put them back together again.

  “Jelly.”

  It had been like living in jelly, because everything seemed to be in slow motion and all the sounds were muffled.

  Music helped, both because she could feel the vibrations, but also because it blocked out all the noise, the sympathetic words of people she didn’t want to hear. For so many months, Emily had wanted to be able to hear properly, and then when it happened, when she understood what they were all talking about, she wished she could go back to living in her bubble of silence.

  Screwing up the scrap of paper, she stuffed it back into her pocket, wiped angrily at her eyes, at the tears that were threatening to fall.

  Tyler pretended not to notice, instead took out the envelope containing her grandmother’s words and read each page in silence. She watched his eyes dart over the words, wondered what effect they were having on someone other than her.

  “Why do you think she’s given you this?” He waved the blue paper at her and it caught in the wind, nearly got carried up and away. Emily grabbed at his hand, wrapped her own around the sheet.

  “The people she met.” Emily looked down at their names, thought of the people she knew, imagined the faces of those she did not. She could hear their voices, picture the gait of their walk. She could see them all sitting on the banks of the river Seine, smoking cigarettes and drinking red wine. Gigi, she knew, was petite, blond, and effervescent, while she imagined Noah as being all furrowed brow, with the scent of bourbon clinging to his skin.

  But she couldn’t picture her grandmother, the young Catriona so full of doubt. Couldn’t get her head around the idea that once she was shy and insecure. She wanted so badly to go back in time, to meet the girl who was no more and ask her what it was that made her change, become the woman who seemed so certain of it all.

  “You think you’re supposed to find them?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Perhaps that’s what her grandmother wanted: for Emily to understand who she used to be, to discover who and what it was that shaped her, left such an impression on her life that she chose to share those particular months, those specific memories, with her granddaughter.

  Only, what would happen if all she did was discover more death? If she were to go through all of this simply to find that none of them, other than Charlie, still existed? It was an idea so sad that Emily pushed it away. Because her grandmother couldn’t—wouldn’t—be that cruel.

  Tyler folded the pages neatly in two, slipped them safely back into their envelope, and handed it over. “Maybe it’s not that convoluted. Maybe she just wants you to see the life she once had.”

  The wind rushed over to them, sneaking under the hem of her skirt, lifting the hairs on her legs, and she stood, turned her back on England, from where they had come.

  Back inside, she took out her sketchbook and ancient Discman, felt the familiar weight of them in her palm, then plugged in Tyler’s headphones. Sketchbook on the table by the window, she flicked through to a blank page, smoothed the sheets down, and readied herself to begin. She knew he was watching, that he was trying to catch a glimpse of all the pages filled with her pictures.

  “What will you do after?” he said.

  “After what?”

  “When this is all over. Will you stay in Norfolk? Mum told me you’ve been doing some freelance work.” He pointed to the window, to where a trio of seagulls now stood. “Is that what the birds are about?”

  “Sort of.” Emily placed the headphones over her ears and pressed the play button, a button which once had the indent of a triangle but had long since been worn smooth. As the thud of bass guitar drowned out the world, she turned a little away from his gaze and began to draw the familiar shape of a wing.

  It had been her grandmother’s idea, for Emily to try working for herself, once she’d decided to turn her hand again to adult fiction. Emily had resisted, said she didn’t want to paint to order. But then Catriona got sick and could no longer find the will to write, and Emily had needed something to keep her mind occupied, keep her hands busy while she watched doctors pump poison through her grandmother’s veins in an attempt to rid her of cancer.

  They would sit and talk about the books, the characters waiting to be brought to life on paper through Emily’s talent. But for Emily it was never the same, because they came from someone she didn’t know. For her there was no one she wanted to draw more than Ophelia.

  Then her grandmother had gone into remission. The cancer was gone and she could pick up where she left off, begin to write once more. For just over a year all was as it should have been, with Emily watching as a new story began to unfold. She had listened to her grandmother on the phone, talking to her publisher, to Charlie, about how she had an idea for something else. Something other than a little girl and her duck, with more magic, more exploration into what it is that binds us all together.

  All was well, the two of them settling back into their hive of creativity, shutting out the world in favor of make-believe. Emily was content in her routine of old, waking each morning to eggs for breakfas
t, followed by a walk along the beach, then back to work on the next drawing, the next idea. She had been happy to continue freelancing, to wait for her grandmother to share her story.

  Until one morning Catriona stumbled on her way back from church, bumped her hip and said it was nothing to worry about, just a bruise. But the bruise had spread and the ache had deepened, and the doctors confirmed that the cancer was back, more furious than before.

  That was when Emily stopped painting for other people and decided instead to create pictures for her grandmother. Pictures from books they had read, classics and comedy alike. Her own interpretation of Elizabeth and Darcy, Romeo and Juliet, Heathcliff and Cathy.

  Seascapes, forests, and imaginary worlds. Portraits of Golum, Dracula, and even Mr. Potter. Anything and everything she could possibly conjure from her mind, thinking it was a way to block out what they both knew would eventually come.

  What on earth was she supposed to draw now?

  Unbeknownst to her, Tyler sat, watching her draw. He noticed how her features had relaxed, the frown turned smooth, and all the tension surrounding her scar had disappeared. It helped him to remember the girl she used to be, the one who taught him what it meant to never be afraid to try.

  10

  PARAKEET

  Melopsittacus undulatus

  Tucked away in the corner of a side street in Paris, there sits a bookshop that has become something of a legend among literary enthusiasts.

  Shakespeare & Company has a green façade, battered wooden shelves set outside on the pavement, a chalkboard adorned with quotes and facts of old, and a square portrait of the Bard himself, hung above the door.

  Does it still look the same? Emily wondered as she crossed over the threshold, breathed in the comforting scent of books. She felt the weight of all those words, some new, some ancient, that filled the minds of people from every part of the world.

  She wished she could ask her grandmother how it had felt when she was there—swap notes to see if the stacks of books, strewn higgledy-piggledy on every available surface, the faint smell of peppermint, the brown linoleum floor, if it was all different, or exactly as it used to be.