The Book of Second Chances

by Katherine Slee

  “She used to sing to me.” Her words came out all tumbled together, as if they had been trying to escape for a very long time and were afraid she might change her mind, keep them locked away.

  “Your mother.”

  “Every night before I went to bed.” The same lullaby. A softer, quieter version of The Magic Flute. During the day she would dance through the house, pouring out arias from Tosca or La Traviata, never caring who was listening. But at night, when it was just the two of them, she would sit Emily in a rocking chair by the window, always open so they could see the ever-changing moon, and sing to her about Tamino and his magic flute.

  “You can always start again.”

  “What?” It was something her grandmother used to say, whenever Emily thought she’d made a mistake, when a picture didn’t appear on the page in the same way she saw it in her mind. How much of what she taught Emily had been learnt from Noah, from all the people she used to know?

  “That’s the beauty of tomorrow,” Noah said as he raised his glass in a toast. “I think it’s time for you to move on. Find something new to paint.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “There’s a line in this story, one I keep going back to, again and again.” He reached out for the book, flipped through the pages until he found the words he was looking for. “Put your hand in the water, and watch all the ripples appear.”

  It was a line from when the dragon asked Ophelia to swim in the waters once more, waters he had warmed with his own fiery breath.

  “I think she meant it as a message for you.” His hand was on hers now, his eyes filled with tears. “That each ripple should be seen as a possibility, and she wanted you to chase them all.”

  “But what if I can’t?”

  “Then at least you tried. That’s all any of us can ever do.”

  Emily looked out to the lake, to where Noah’s boat was gently pitching on the water. Always water. From the very beginning, she had always taken Emily to the water.

  “How long will it take to get to Lugano?”

  “It’s not far. But stay here, just for one night, and tomorrow I will take you back to Beth.”

  There was a canary-yellow sofa with tassels all around its base. A pale, gray marble bathroom with roses set by the sink. A bed as soft as a dream and a mahogany writing desk positioned by an open window, from which Emily could hear crickets rubbing their legs together in unison, singing their strange dusk chorus.

  “I get it,” she whispered to the moon, to all the birds that flew through the darkening sky. “I get it,” she whispered again, taking out a plain white envelope and steeling herself for those sheets of palest blue and what they might contain.

  She understood how she had been trapped in the memory of a thirteen-year-old girl. A girl who took flight, like a bird, to try to escape the pain she had witnessed. But now she needed to take a leap of faith, rid herself of the past and set herself free.

  25 May 1968

  The sky is hanging down in slithers of purple and blue, with no more than a sprinkling of stars reflected back from an inky pool of water.

  It is so very, very peaceful here. Margot is sleeping on the bed next to me, Noah on the sofa next door. If I listen carefully, I can hear them both breathing in their own unique rhythms. One long and labored, the other all in a rush, a quickstep then pause as she dreams.

  He wants me to stay. Asked me again to marry him, this time with a beautiful sapphire ring, and I was so very tempted. But is he asking because of me, or because of Margot? I see the way he looks at her, with a different kind of longing to the way those eyes would land on me. He wants a family, a connection, a reason for getting up in the morning. I want it too, but not like this. We would argue, we always do, and Margot doesn’t belong to him. She doesn’t belong to anyone and neither do I.

  He would make me into a wife, which comes with its own set of unspoken rules and I don’t do rules, not anymore.

  I suppose I could go to Gigi. Raise Margot there as part of a larger, extended family. But it’s not my family, it’s not where I want to set down roots in this world. I still want to travel, to see what delights are hiding around the next corner, but I also understand how unfair that would be on Margot, at least when she is bigger and needs a life that isn’t dictated by her mother.

  This is the part I wasn’t prepared for. Always thinking about someone else. Always basing your decisions on whether it would work for them, as well as you. But it’s my life too, so why can’t I just live it? The constant pull of the heart, the constant need to remember that I chose to bring her into this world, she was not of her own making. It is my responsibility to teach her about life, but also let her discover it for herself. How to find the balance? How to ever know if what I’m doing is right?

  Or I stay. Give her the traditional family, with two parents, a home and, perhaps, one day, a sibling or two. But it would stagnate me and at some point I would come to resent the decisions I made on her behalf. I do not ever, not for a single second, want to regret anything about her.

  But where to? The stigma of being an unmarried mother isn’t one that you can easily shake away. All the questions, the knowing looks, the judgment. Do I really want that? Do I actually care? Of course I do. We all care about the opinions of others. No one is completely immune to how we are perceived by the world.

  Then there’s always the option of going home, but not to Scotland. To London, where Charlie is now working for a publishing house. She’s had some interest in my first two books, wants to know if there’s a third in the making (easier said than done with a curious toddler to contend with!). But I know she just wants me to go back so she can play at being mother, at keeping house, at having something in her life other than her work. She also told me I could do some freelance work, as an editor, help pay the bills while I write. It sounds so very tempting, but also a little bit like the easy way out.

  One day I know I will have to put down roots. One day Margot will have to go to school, make friends, follow the same path that everyone else does. I wish it could be different. I wish we could simply see where fate sends us. Travel the globe with nothing more than a notebook and our dreams. But that’s just it, it’s my dream, not hers. And she still isn’t even close to being of an age where she can try to figure out who she wants to be, what she wants to do. I suppose neither have I, but that doesn’t mean I can’t stop trying.

  And men make you stop. Men make you question everything. Make your heart sing then weep in the blink of an eye. Make you forget all rational, sensible thought and think only of the way he makes you feel when he kisses you slowly and whispers again about love.

  Noah is my undoing, as I knew from the very first moment we met, in that cramped, dusty, incredible bookstore in Paris. He is my soulmate, but that doesn’t mean I should stay. It doesn’t mean I should sacrifice my own wants and desires, my own ambitions, just to fit in with his. Because this is his forever. It is beautiful, it would be the perfect place to raise a child, but it does not come from me, from who I am, who I want to try and become.

  I haven’t yet found my forever place in this world. Haven’t yet discovered where it is that I fit. Although there is an image that follows me wherever I go. Of a house in a village by the sea. With apple trees in the back garden and a desk by the window so that I might watch all the comings and goings of nature as I write.

  Maybe that’s what I’ve been looking for. Somewhere hidden away from the world, just for Margot and me. We don’t need anything more.

  CMR

  21

  NIGHTINGALE

  Luscinia megarhynchos

  Everything happens for a reason. Everything will be okay in the end. He’s not going to kill you; stop panicking.

  All of these thoughts and more raced around Emily’s mind as she gripped her battered yellow suitcase in her lap. Every bump in the road could be felt through the thin metal casing of the motorbike sidecar in which she sat, a pair of old-fashioned goggles strapped to her
head and obscuring the view.

  Had she known this was Noah’s suggested mode of transportation, she would have gladly taken a taxi back to Verona, knocked on the door to Tyler and Phoebe’s room and asked if they could accompany her back to England instead, on the Eurotunnel no less. Or called Antoine and asked him to put her back inside his tiny private plane, all enclosed spaces with no means of escape.

  If she had she known this was where she would end up when she first entered the bookshop back in Norfolk, no, when that man and his dog turned up on her doorstep, she would have laughed in the face of all things fateful and serendipitous and told the gods to leave her be.

  She could hear the sound of water, could see the church steeple rising from the hillside, taste the scent of pine mixed through with salt. It was all so familiar, and yet she wasn’t yet able to link together now with then. The reality of what was staring her in the face versus the memory of a place she never thought she would come back to, having been so desperate to escape.

  Noah stood by her side, hands on hips, still wearing his helmet. They were both looking up at the front façade of a house that had been extended in all directions. It had a picture-perfect porch that wrapped around the side, with an oversize swing hanging from the rafters, on which were sleeping a pair of fat, ginger cats.

  Beyond the porch was a gate to the vegetable patch, where Emily and her grandmother helped plant seedlings, pulled away weeds and dug up carrots to be taken to the kitchen for supper. On the upper floor, around the back, were two bedrooms, connected by a Jack ’n’ Jill bathroom. One of the rooms had lilac walls and a corner seat by the window, overlooking the water. Scratched into the base of that seat was the shape of a duck, along with her initials, E.C.D. Emily Catriona Davenport. The name her parents gave her. The name she felt stopped belonging to her the moment they were gone.

  “Are you going up?” Noah nudged her with his foot.

  “Aren’t you coming in?”

  “This is where I say goodbye.”

  She stared at him. “Goodbye?”

  “For now.” One hand on the back of her neck, so familiar, so comforting. “This part is up to you. But you know where to find me, and I will always be here for you. Remember that you are not alone, that there are people who care for you, and not just because of her.”

  He kissed her cheek gently, and she watched him mount his bike, roar up the engine, and disappear off and down the road, out of sight.

  Come on, then, Emily told herself as she picked up her case, climbed the steps to the maroon front door, rang the bell, and waited for her past to open up, invite her in.

  The clinic was like an old hotel, designed to make people believe they were anywhere but a medical facility. It was all polished brass doorknobs, oversize chairs and fresh flowers in cut glass vases. But the people in wheelchairs, or with tubes attached to various parts of their anatomy, draped in such a way as ordinary folk accessorize with a necklace, made it apparent this wasn’t a holiday retreat.

  Emily hadn’t been back for well over ten years, during which time subtle changes had been made: a sound system had been installed, there was new carpet on the stairs, and a grand piano by the French doors that opened onto the garden. But the security cameras remained, there to make sure you were safe and sound in the rehabilitation clinic dressed up as a country lodge.

  She was asked to wait, to sit in the reception area just like any other guest. Absently flicking through magazines with pictures of strangers smiling back, not taking in any of the articles about the benefits of acupuncture or aromatherapy baths. She couldn’t focus because of the smell that was permeating from the kitchen that she knew was down the hall and off to the right. Roasting meat and cinnamon, all mixed in together, along with antiseptic and furniture polish.

  It transported her back to a time when she was so very angry with the world, with herself, because she’d survived. A time when she couldn’t hold on to any happy memories. When she kept asking to go home, then realized there was no point because her parents were gone. Her room, her things, her life, had all been destroyed by the knowledge that she would never get to enjoy them again. Her school, her friends, everything, gone, changed, ruined, never to be the same again.

  No one looked at her the same way, or spoke to her, or paid her the same amount of attention, because she was damaged and bruised and was just someone to pity. Not a person, not a child, just a body in a wheelchair that everyone was trying to fix. But they never understood she didn’t want to be fixed, she wanted to be gone.

  “Emily?” Emily was pulled back to where a woman stood before her, a smile on her face and concern in her eyes.

  It was the same woman who had treated her, here, when the hospital in England could do no more. When her grandmother decided to take her away from all the people, all the memories, of her life before the accident, deciding to bring her to a clinic where her friend was training as a psychiatrist. A woman whom Catriona first met in Paris but had never told Emily the connection, instead waiting until she herself was gone before revealing the truth about all those people, all those lives that dipped and weaved through one another.

  “My goodness, aren’t you just the most wonderful surprise?” Beth pulled Emily into an embrace, and she relaxed into the older woman’s arms, breathed in the familiar scent of her, felt a sense of peace settle in her heart.

  “She gave you the earrings.” Emily stared at Beth, taking in the hair now cropped close to her head, the deeper lines around the eyes, the softening of skin at her throat. “And it was you, stood next to Antoine in the photograph.”

  “What photograph?”

  “In Paris. By the bookstore.”

  “My goodness, I’d forgotten all about that. Trust Catriona to have it all this time.”

  “No, it wasn’t her.”

  Beth didn’t catch the words Emily whispered because she had picked up her case and stashed it behind the front desk. Nor did she see the way Emily was staring at nothing as they walked, side by side, feeling a little off-kilter, a little faint, because she was thinking back to that bookstore in Paris, to the place where they had all met and how very, very envious she was that it couldn’t have been her life instead.

  Six people, brought together by a twist of fate. Their lives interlinked in so many ways, most recently by another death, but also the possibility of a new beginning. Her new beginning, and she saw how they had all played their part in bringing her back here, each of them carrying out her grandmother’s wishes, and yet she still didn’t understand why.

  Beth took her to a familiar room, with a large desk at the far end. On top was a computer, a stack of papers, and a silver photo frame that held a photograph of a family Emily had never met. Her eyes flickered to the back of the room, where an old-fashioned music system still sat, nestled in amongst books, photographs, and keepsakes.

  Emily went over to it, knelt down on the floor in the same spot as she always used to. She felt the room sway a little as she remembered all the time she had spent in here, locked away on her own, listening to music and painting pictures of everything she couldn’t say.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Emily thought of her grandmother’s funeral, of all the people paying their respects. Some of them had been complicit in keeping a secret from her.

  “She made us promise not to.”

  “She wouldn’t have known.”

  “But we would.”

  Emily wished she could put those six friends back together again, take their photograph once more, have them share a bottle of wine or two over a long meal, swap stories of their lives as they laughed and reminisced and swore not to leave it so long before next they met.

  Except that would never happen. Two of the six were dead, and Emily wasn’t certain she would ever be able to get Antoine and Noah in the same room for more than a few minutes before they started arguing. But then death does strange things to people, makes them act completely out of character.

  They were the people
who had shaped Catriona, made her the woman she became.

  Every single interaction, no matter how small, has an impact on who you turn out to be. Every conversation, every disappointment, every touch, they all combine into one huge mess called life.

  Emily heard a drawer being opened, then the sound of something being placed on top of the desk.

  I don’t want it. Emily dropped her head. I don’t want to know what it is she made me come here for.

  But she did want to know, or at least part of her knew it was pointless to try to resist. So she stood up, went over to the desk, and opened up the package, because she had come this far and it would be a complete waste of time, of life, to give up now.

  Inside a white manila envelope were a few familiar sheets of palest blue, folded in half, along with a handful of lined pages, torn along one edge and tied through a hole with red string.

  Emily took a breath. Could they be the missing pages, the story Catriona Robinson was rumored to have written?

  “I don’t understand,” she said as she flicked through the pages, only to see that most of them were empty. A few ideas, places and names. Nothing more substantial than what was in the notebook given to Emily by the bookseller, all the way back in Norfolk. Why rip them out? Why send her all the way here to find absolutely nothing at all?

  “Where’s the finished book?” Emily looked at Beth.

  “I’m sorry, Emily,” she said with hands splayed. “I don’t have anything else.”

  Emily flicked through the pages once again, back and forth, as if somehow more words would appear. “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “That’s all she sent me. That,”—Beth pointed at the manila envelope—“along with the real will, and a letter.”

  “The real will?”

  Emily looked back inside the envelope to find something she had missed, then scanned the words typed neatly on several pages and signed at the end by her grandmother.