Come what may, this is the life I have lived. This is what I am choosing to leave behind, for Emily. This has been me, Catriona Mairi Robinson, 71, a woman who has had time to count all the blessings I have been so very lucky to have.
CMR
22
PHOENIX
Phoenix
Emily was back where it all ended, where it all began. Next to a lake, with nothing but the birds for company, she sat, thinking about all the people she had met, and all the places she had traveled, the fears, the demons faced along the way.
She folded up her grandmother’s words, placed them safely inside her pocket and allowed herself to cry. To really cry. For each of those tears to represent a piece of her heart that had been broken, been existing in a state of fear, for far too long. To mourn the death of her parents, her grandmother, the life she was too afraid to embrace.
She cried for the little girl who once was, whose life became fractured in a split second by a cruel twist of fate that changed everything, because time wasn’t something you could grasp onto, it could only ever be understood when there wasn’t any of it left.
Her spine curled over, waves of sorrow flowing up and down her back as she sobbed until there was nothing left inside to come out.
“Emily?”
Her head snapped up. She watched him approach and allowed him to sit next to her, curl his arm around and draw her close. The nearness of him made her cry all over again.
“It’s okay,” Tyler whispered against her hair. “It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not okay.” She shook her head, saw streaks of wet on his shirt. “I’ve wasted so much time. I’ve spent years stuck in the past, and for what?”
“You nearly died, Em. You were a girl who had her body broken in two, not to mention the psychological impact the accident must have had on you.”
“All I did was hide.”
“All you did was survive.”
“What was the point of it all, if I can only ever draw what she wrote?”
“I think you did a lot more than that.”
Emily felt him shift beside her, sat back to see him holding out her sketchbook. The one she left behind in Verona.
“You brought that all this way.”
“I did. For my sins.”
“Why?”
“Because you need to see, to really see, what you’re capable of.”
He opened it to the first picture drawn on their journey. A drawing of a couple of seagulls, standing opposite each other, beaks open as if having a conversation. One of them sat on top of a unicycle, the other held a newspaper under its wing. A newspaper with a headline printed in bold, reporting the death of Britain’s favorite children’s author.
The next was of Tyler, walking through a field of silver and blue grass. All those notes twisting up to become a flock of migrating birds, heading off to unknown lands. What she hadn’t realized at the time was that she had drawn herself into that very same picture. Walking along beside him, with a battered yellow suitcase in tow.
More pictures. More surprises, but each of them linked somehow to the journey she was being forced to take. A sketch of her grandmother and a man, seated on a bench in a town by a lake, heads dipped close together and a baby asleep in a pram, close by.
A group of hummingbirds sat on a branch, watching as a couple danced under the Eiffel Tower, illuminated only by the moon. The woman was wearing a fifties-style dress, the man was holding tight to a small velvet box, inside of which Emily knew was a diamond ring.
So many pictures she did not remember creating. So many tiny details she had hidden in them all.
Then the last. All those starlings she saw in Rome, minute specks of brown that she drew over and over to form the face of a woman. Her face. Her torment and fear all gathered up in what she mistook for a tornado.
“You’ve always done it,” Tyler said, going back to the picture of Ophelia on her bike, pointing to the shepherd with his flock. Only then did Emily realize whose face she had really painted. Only then did she understand what it was Tyler had come to show her.
“I didn’t know,” she gasped, turning each page in reverse. All the way back to a pearlescent cockatoo, with wings stretched wide, ready to soar toward the setting sun as it dipped below the horizon. Back to the very first one in the book, showing her grandmother propped up in bed. Emily had drawn it as she slept, unaware of how she had replaced Catriona’s face with that of her mother, imagined her old and worn through with time. How she wished she could have been allowed to survive, for them all to have been a family.
By putting them down on paper, she had kept them trapped, kept her grief trapped and unable to be set free. But she had never learnt to deal with any of it—never learnt to grieve, to mourn, to accept that death is an inevitable, horrific, part of life.
Emily closed the sketchbook, wiping at her face with the back of her sleeve.
“How did you find me?”
He was looking at her again, in that way of his. It made her wonder if she seemed different, if the tears had changed the contours of her face, revealed a part of her that wasn’t there before.
“I called my mother.”
“That must have been fun.”
“I sent her a copy of this,” he said, showing her a snapshot of the photograph taken outside the bookstore in Paris. “Asked who the last woman was.”
Emily allowed her eye to travel over them each in turn, then go back to rest on Catriona. She drank in the freedom, the joy, in her grandmother’s smile. And even though she was dead, Gigi too, they were not gone, because there was still someone left behind, to remember.
“Where’s Phoebe?”
“She decided to go home. Said she needed to find her own way. Something about saving the gorillas…”
Emily let out a small laugh before folding her face into a frown. “I’m sorry.”
“It never would have lasted, not with me going to Nashville. Besides,”—he bumped against Emily, let his shoulder rest against her own—“she was way too normal for my liking.”
“When do you go?”
“Now. Tonight.” He took a breath. “My flight leaves in a couple of hours.”
“Why are you here, Tyler?”
He replied by bending his head to kiss her, just once. A gentle touch of lips, and she wanted to lean into it, to lose herself in the moment, but something made her move away.
So much had changed in such a short space of time. So much for her heart and mind to contend with, but she had not yet had a moment to try and make sense of any of it, least of all him. So much time that she didn’t know what to do with. Days and nights and stolen moments in between that were all now hers to do with what she wanted.
“Come with me,” he whispered, resting his forehead against her own.
Emily stared at him, wanting to be able to simply say yes, to be swept off to Nashville, to immerse herself in the romance of her very own story.
The only problem was, she remembered what her grandmother had written in her diary. About Noah asking her to marry him, about why she said no. Because he would change her, make her into someone she didn’t want to be.
Going to Nashville, falling in love, would be the easy option and in a way would allow her to hide again, to hide from herself, from the choices she knew she had yet to make. She had so much time to explore and decide, to make peace with being alone.
“I have this image in my mind and cannot recall if it’s a memory or a dream,” Emily said, watching Tyler closely for some kind of reaction, trying not to think about how easily the words now spilt from her mouth, how she didn’t care if her tongue got caught around one of the syllables, or if she stumbled and lisped, because it was him. He knew her, he saw her, not the idea of someone who used to be.
“Go on.” He smiled at her and for a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her again.
“I’m looking down to see the shadow of a plane, skimming over the ground. I’m thinking that the shadow
was in fact another, hidden, plane, which only existed when the sun shone, revealing it to the world. I have lived so much of my life like that plane. Hiding, waiting for the light to shine on me.”
“I take it that’s a no.”
So much time spent pushing people away, but she had never really been alone. There had always been someone to check up on her, even when her grandmother was away on a book tour, or had meetings in town. Charlie, the vicar, even that man and his dog, and now Tyler.
“Nashville is your dream, and if I came with you I’d only end up regretting it.” An idea for a story began to form in her mind. A map made out of the memories of thousands of people, each of them unique yet somehow linked by the paths they tread. Ophelia grown up, exploring secrets, like an excavator of the truth, reuniting people with objects, memories they thought were lost forever.
“Sounds pretty final.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He blew out a long breath of acceptance. “I was unfair to you and Phoebe. Even before that, with the whole enormous mess of it all.”
“Neither of us asked for this to happen.”
“I’m glad that it did. I’m glad I got to see you again, to remember who I used to be, when we were young.” He stood, then pulled her to her feet and kissed her, once, on the cheek.
She watched him walk away, bent down to pick up her bag and sketchbook, noticed something tucked into the inside cover. A postcard, on the front of which was a picture of a bright red bird, wings open as it soared toward a setting sun. Turning it over, she saw where he had scribbled a few lines, the letters almost jumping around on the paper as she tried to read through her tears.
To me, you are a phoenix.
Brilliantly colored with a fire that burns deep inside.
But when the rhythms of your heart can only cry,
Know that I think of you.
Because you are my reason,
You make me want to try.
He’s my Noah, Emily gasped as she looked up, saw Tyler at the very edge of the lawn, one hand reaching out to open the gate, poised and ready to leave.
“Wait.” The word was no more than a whisper as she felt it catch against her heart. “Wait,” she said again, then began to run as he turned his head to smile.
Arms around his neck, she kissed him deeply. In that moment, she forgot it all. Forgot the pull of scar tissue across her cheek, the ache along her spine, the years spent hiding away, believing she wasn’t deserving of love. In that moment, she became once more the girl she used to be. A girl kissed on a summer’s night, with all the hopes and possibilities of tomorrow flickering inside her heart.
Just like that, she felt herself give way, to slip inside his soul, and allowed her heart to open to the possibility of what could be.
“You changed your mind?” He pulled away, a little breathless, a little surprised.
“Yes. No. I mean, I can’t come with you.”
His face fell as he let go of her. “Oh.”
“Because it’s your dream.” There was no space between them and yet he felt so far away.
“You said that already.”
Emily ran her finger around the collar of his shirt, felt him stiffen then relax against her touch. “If I came with you, it would be for the wrong reasons.”
“You said that too.”
“But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t come back.” She stepped closer, placed both hands on his chest, felt the rise and fall of his breath. “Or I meet you halfway?”
He chuckled, the sound vibrating through her fingertips.
“Halfway is the middle of the ocean, Em.” Two arms came around her waist and she leant into him, breathed in his nearness.
“My point is, I need to figure out what it is I want to do.” She tilted her face to look up at him. “And I can’t do that if I’m following you.”
He was smiling down at her, a new look on his face. One she hadn’t seen before.
“What?”
“You look very beautiful when you’re all fired up about something.” He kissed her forehead, her scar, her mouth, and she waited for the moment when she would choose to step away, surprised herself when it didn’t come.
“Where will you go?” he whispered against her lips.
Emily smiled. “Home.”
23
MAGPIE
Pica pica
The garden was still. The leaves were beginning to turn, signaling a new season was on its way. There was a freshness to the air, which carried the sound of the church clock, chiming out another hour. Emily stopped a moment, let the sight of her home fill her heart anew.
Could it really have been only nine days since she’d left? So much packed into such a short space of time. So much more she now wanted to do, to discover, to begin to live the way her grandmother would have wanted her to.
A magpie swooped down as she opened the front door, hopped in after her and called out his greeting.
“Hello, Milton,” she said, bending down to give him a stroke, but he jumped out of the way and onto the answerphone, which was blinking all of its messages, none of which she had any inclination to listen to. There was a pile of post stacked neatly on the hall table, and a thick, padded envelope on the top, with a foreign stamp, a postmark telling her it had been sent from Italy.
Noah. Perhaps he had decided to send her the letters from Catriona. But it could wait, and maybe she didn’t need to read anything more, not just yet.
The house was as it was before, but something had changed. Was it the space around her or the way she now stood in the space that was different?
On the wall hung a mirror she had avoided for as long as she could remember. Her reflection showed the same face as when she left, yet it was altogether different, because she was changed from the person who had woken one morning and assumed it was a day like any other. A day when she received a letter that would turn her entire world inside out.
She was no longer the person who had been existing but not living. Nor could she pretend that she hadn’t been affected by Tyler, and how he had made her heart dare to give in, to finally say “maybe.”
What now? How to start again, how to figure out the future?
“Tea,” Emily told herself as she went into the kitchen, paused at the fridge to rest her fingers on her grandmother’s favorite Anne of Green Gables quote still taped to the door.
She had been dying, slowly, from the inside out. Her grandmother was the only one who could see it and chose to save Emily, to make her notice all the little cracks in the world and not always see them as a bad thing.
Emily filled the kettle from the sink and set it on the stove. Then she opened the back door wide, let in the familiar scent of apple and honeysuckle as she looked up to the sky, at the great, comforting stretch of blue, and sighed her relief to be home.
It was only when she turned around, ready to reach into the dresser for her favorite mug, with turtledoves around the rim, that she saw it.
A box. A simple, cardboard box, sitting on the kitchen table by the window, waiting for her to pay attention. Underneath was tucked a note, written by an unfamiliar hand.
Emily pushed the box aside, read the words sent to her along with the unexpected gift.
For Emily. She asked me to tell you that the rest is up to you. Yours, Richard Thomas. P.S. Max says hello and invites you to walk with us both along the beach one day, whenever you’re ready.
The man with the dog. Apparently tasked with leaving Emily one last surprise from her grandmother.
“I don’t want to look,” Emily said as Milton jumped onto the back of one of the chairs, tilted his head toward the box. “I don’t want to look,” she said again, but found her fingers reaching out to open her gift. Those curious, pesky fingers that always wanted to see, to touch.
Inside were a stuffed toy, a photograph, and a small red notebook.
“Oh.” Emily took a step back, then peered inside once more.
The toy w
as a duck with patchwork feet and bright green eyes. Emily remembered he used to have a spotted bow tie, but that it got lost long ago. She picked him up, brought him to her nose, and inhaled the scent of her childhood. She could picture her old room, the wooden doll’s house by the window, a thin layer of dust on its roof betraying how little she played with it. A canopy bed with fairy lights strung all around, a cupboard stuffed full of books, and a chair by the window, in which she would sit with her mother, reading stories each night before going to sleep.
With a shaking hand, she picked up the photograph. She saw it was of her as a baby, cradled in her mother’s arms, and her father bending down to place a kiss on top of her head. Baby Emily was holding tight to the very same duck now sitting on the table, looking back at her with pebbly eyes.
Emily went next door to the living room, put the frame front and center on the mantelpiece, next to the one of Gigi and Giancarlo on their wedding day. She looked across to where other memories were caught within a frame. Now she knew that the pain, the sorrow, she felt at the absence of all she once had was shared by her grandmother. She could finally accept, understand, that it was felt the world over by anyone and everyone who had ever lost someone they loved.
Next door, her grandmother’s study waited, still and quiet, with the desk by the window on which her ancient typewriter sat, its keys shining in the afternoon light. A shelf full of red notebooks, just like the one in her hand, filled with all the imaginings of that incredible mind.
But this notebook was different somehow, with one of the corners worn away, and the pages felt stiff and crackly as she eased apart the spine. In the center of the first page was a title, written by a child’s hand.
The Adventures of Ophelia and Terence
By Emily Catriona Davenport (age 9)
“Oh,” she whispered, turning the page to see a drawing of a little girl with pigtails, holding tight to the hand of a pale gray duck.
The Book of Second Chances Page 26
