The Summer of Impossible Things

by Rowan Coleman

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  7 July 2007

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  8 July

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  9 July

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  10 July

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  11 July

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  12 July

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  13 July

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  If you could change the past, would you?

  It is only after her mother’s death that Luna begins to discover her secrets.

  While in New York to settle the estate, something impossible happens to Luna. She finds herself in 1977, face to face with her mother as a young woman, in the week that changed her life forever.

  If time can be turned back, can it also be rewritten? Luna becomes convinced she can save her mother from the moment that will eventually drive her to suicide.

  But in doing anything – everything – to save her mother’s life, will Luna have to sacrifice her own?

  From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Memory Book, this is a beautiful, lush novel about love, courage and sacrifice, The Time Traveller’s Wife for a new readership.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rowan Coleman lives with her husband, and five children in a very full house in Hertfordshire. She juggles writing novels with raising her family. She really wishes someone would invent time travel.

  To find out more about Rowan Coleman, visit her website at: www.rowancoleman.co.uk, Facebook or Twitter: @rowancoleman.

  To Lily, who is so clever, kind and courageous, and has the whole universe at her feet.

  ‘Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

  Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

  PROLOGUE

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  OXFORDSHIRE, 6 JUNE 2007

  Watching my mother’s face for the first time since the night she died, I am altered. I am unravelled and undone – in one instant becoming a stranger in my own skin.

  There is a theory that just by looking at something you can transform the way it behaves; change the universe and how it works at quantum level, simply by seeing. The observer effect, we call it in physics, or the uncertainty principle. Of course the universe will do what the universe always does, whether we are watching or not, but these are the thoughts I can’t shake out of my head as I watch my mother’s fragile image, flickering as it’s projected on the wall. That just by looking at this film of her, I have changed the fabric of everything I thought I knew.

  Just seconds ago my mother told me and my sister that my dad – the man I grew up with, and whom I love – is not my biological father. Yes, the universe around me shifted and reformed for ever; and yet the second she said it I understood that I have always known it to be true, always felt my incongruity, in every beat of my heart, tilt of my head. In my outsider’s blue eyes.

  There is no choice now but to watch on: the course is set and I am travelling it. I have to see, no matter what, although looking will change everything. It’s simple physics, the mystery of the universe encapsulated in these intimate, pivotal moments.

  But there is no equation to express how I feel, looking at the face of the woman I have missed every second for the last eight months.

  She sits in the Oxfordshire country garden of the house I grew up in. The same garden is in full and glorious bloom outside the creaking barn door now, the roses still bear the scars from her pruning, the azaleas she planted are still in bud. But the garden I am watching her sit in may as well be on Mars, so far away from me does she seem. She is so far away now, out of reach for good. A light-grey, cotton dress blows against her bare brown legs, her hair is streaked with silver, her eyes full of light. There’s an old chair from the kitchen, its legs sinking slightly into the soft grass. This must have been recorded in late summer because the rose bushes are in bloom, their dark glossy leaves reflecting the sun. It was probably last summer, just after Dad got the all clear, after a few terrifying weeks in which we thought he might have bowel cancer. That means that as long ago as last summer, months and months before she died, she knew already what she was going to do. I experience this realisation as a physical pain in my chest, searing and hot.

  ‘Although the watch keeps ticking on my wrist,’ her captured image is saying, the breeze lifting the hair off her face. ‘I am still trapped back there, at least part of me is. I’m pinned like a butterfly to one single minute, in one single hour, on the day that changed my life.’

  There are tears in her eyes.

  ‘To everyone around me it might have seemed that I kept walking and talking, appearing to be travelling through time at the allotted sixty seconds per minute, but actually I was static, caught in suspended animation, thinking, always thinking about that one act … that one … choice.’

  Her fingers cover her face for a moment, perhaps trying to cover the threat of more tears; her throat moves, her chest stills. When her hands fall back down to her lap she is smiling. It’s a smile I know well: it’s her brave smile.

  ‘I love you, my beautiful daughters.’

  It’s a phrase that she had said to us almost every day of our lives, and to hear her say it again, even over the thrum of the projector, is something like magic, and I want to catch it, hold it in the palm of my hand.

  Leaning forward in her chair, her eyes search the lens, searching me out, and I find myself edging away from her, as if she might try to reach out and touch me.

  ‘I made this film as my goodbye, because I don’t know when – or if – I will have the courage to say it in person. It’s my goodbye, and something else. It’s a message for you, Luna.’

  When she says my name, I can feel her breath on my neck as she speaks.

  ‘The truth is, I don’t know if I eve
r want to you to see it, to see any of this. Perhaps you never will. Perhaps here, in this moment, in this way, is the only time I can tell you and Pia about my other life, the life I live alongside the one I have with you girls and your father, the life I live in a parallel universe, where the clock’s second hand never moves forward. Yes, I think … I think this is the only place I’m brave enough to tell you.’ She shakes her head, tears glisten, whilst behind her head the ghosts of long-dead bees drone in and out of the foxgloves, collecting pollen over the brickwork of a derelict building.

  ‘You see, once, a long time ago, something really, really bad happened to me, and I did something terrible in return. And ever since that moment, there has been a ghost at my shoulder, following me everywhere I go, waiting everywhere I look, stalking me. And I know, I know that one day I won’t be able to outrun him any more. One day he will catch up with me. One day he will have his revenge. One day soon. If you are watching this –’ her voice hooks into me ‘— then he already has me …’

  She draws so close to the lens that we can only see one unfocused quarter of her face; she lowers her voice to a whisper. ‘Listen, if you look very hard and very carefully you’ll find me in Brooklyn, in the place and the moment I never truly left. At our building, the place I grew up in, that’s where you will find me, and the other films I made for you. Luna, if you look hard enough – if you want to look after you know what I did … He wouldn’t let me go, you see. Find me … please.’

  7 JULY 2007

  ‘This distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion.’

  —Albert Einstein

  CHAPTER ONE

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  We travel in a kind of bubble, my little sister Pia and I, sheltered in the quiet, cool interior of an air-conditioned cab, while outside the searing summer streets of an unfamiliar landscape unfold ever outwards as we make each turn. We slip past bridges and buildings that are a kind of second-hand familiar, the relics of the tales that we grew up listening to; a constantly increasing map of a world neither of us have ever visited before, but which is written into our DNA.

  Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, is nothing like I imagined it would be after a lifetime of watching movies set in New York State. It’s a low, two-storey landscape of wide avenues and neat, wooden-clad houses; small-town America, on the edge of a huge borough that lives right next door, the greatest city on earth. New York seems to peer at Bay Ridge over the expanse of the Hudson with an uninterested shrug.

  There is an air of quiet certainty unfurling in the searing July sunshine. Even the people meandering down the sidewalks have an innately serene look about them, as if this place is made only for them, a safe place, a place where the rest of the world never looks, a place where secrets might never be discovered if you know where to hide them. This is where life and love and death can quietly play out, without barely making a ripple of the surface of the planet. It’s almost as if when you cross the Brooklyn Bridge times slows down just a little, right at its zenith.

  This is the world where our mother grew up, the world she ran away from, never to return. It never occurred to us that one day it would be us travelling back here, all the way back to her starting point. Officially we are here to finally settle her estate, and begin the sale of the long derelict, boarded-up building she co-owned with her sister, a woman she hadn’t spoken to in thirty years. The building had once been her home, the centre of her universe. Unofficially, secretly, we came because she told us to. To look for her, and to look for clues about my biological father, whose existence still seems like a mangled dream to me.

  ‘She could have just got it wrong,’ Pea had said after the film ended, disturbed dust still settling in the light of Dad’s projector that we’d had to borrow in secret. ‘I mean, in her darkest moment, she had delusions. She had fantasies. She could have just been living a nightmare out loud, that could be it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, slowly, uncertainly, letting her words seeps into me through every pore. ‘Yes, it could be that … but …’

  I looked at my sister, and I knew she was beginning to see what I already knew. My bright-blue eyes, the only blue eyes for generations on either side of the family, as far back as anyone can remember.

  ‘But you have to find out if it might be true,’ Pea finished for me. ‘They loved each other so much, especially back then, when she left Brooklyn, left her family to be with him. It just doesn’t make sense that there would be another man … But even if there was, it doesn’t change anything. You’re still you. You’re still our Luna.’

  She couldn’t know that I had always felt a little bit like a stranger in my own family, a little bit out of step with them. That, somehow, what Mum said was strangely comforting.

  Dad had wanted to come on this trip, but we’d persuaded him to stay at home. Even now, months later, he was so fragile after losing her, his blood pressure still high, and the doctor didn’t recommend flying. We didn’t tell him about the film, even though we could have. We could have asked him outright if it was true, and taken him at his word, but we didn’t. It seemed too cruel for him to lose a wife and a daughter in the space of a few months, even if we loved each other in just the same way as we always have. I think him knowing that I knew would hurt him. So we begged him to stay at home, be taken care of by his friends, and let us sort out the paperwork. And maybe uncover secrets, and part of me. The part of me that was most like my mother truly believed she might be waiting there for us.

  Her sister, Stephanie, had wanted to sell the minute their father, our grandfather, had died in 1982. Lawyers’ letters came in the post thick and fast and, although I didn’t really know what they were about, I could see how just the sight of the distinctive airmail envelope would make my mother’s hands tremble. Mum had refused to sell, she wouldn’t budge. She had her reasons; we never knew them, but whatever they were, perhaps she had planned it this way, because she had left her half of her family home to Pea and me. And now – just when we need it – there is money waiting to be accessed. One trip to Bay Ridge, put the building on the market, and there should be enough from the proceeds to get my sister back on her feet, this time for good. And perhaps I can find answers to questions I’ve always had, even if I haven’t quite known what they were.

  Pea – I’ve called her that since she was born – sits nervously; her fingers twitch in her lap, her nails are broken and bitten down, knuckles pinks and grazed, with combat, but not a fist fight. These are the scars of her daily battle not to reach for a drink or a pill. Twenty-four years old and eight weeks clean this time. Last time she stayed sober for eighteen months, and I thought maybe she had cracked it, but then Mum died, suddenly and shockingly. I fought so hard to hold on to her, against the tsunami of grief and chaos that we could both see was coming to sweep her away, but I wasn’t strong enough.

  This time I won’t let my sister down.

  This time, I will keep her safe. If I can just hold on to what matters, what is real, then I will be able to save her.

  Resting the weight of my camera on my thigh, I reach out and take her hand, stilling it. She looks at me from behind the pink, heart-shaped sunglasses she bought at the airport.

  ‘What did you bring that old thing for, anyway?’ she asks me, nodding at the camera, my dad’s old Pentax, the one he was looking through the very first time he set eyes on Mum. ‘You couldn’t even get fifty quid for it on eBay. I know, because I tried once. It’s all digital now, you know.’

  ‘I know, but this is more than just a camera, it’s a … relic. It’s a little piece of Mum and Dad’s story, and besides, I like looking at things through a lens. I thought I could shoot the places that Dad shot, recreate the images for him. He might not have been up to making the trip but his camera could, I thought he’d like it.’

  ‘He will like it.’ Pea nods. ‘You should have been a photographer, not a scientist; you’re too artistic to be
a scientist.’

  ‘I’m a physicist,’ I remind her. ‘And actually a lot of what I do is art. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Like I’d really like a drink, a hit or both,’ she says. ‘But then again, I’m awake, so nothing new there.’

  We let the road slip under us in silence for a few moments.

  ‘But how are you?’ she asks finally. ‘I mean really.’

  I hesitate; if I were to answer that question accurately I’d say full of rage and grief, terrified and lost, unsure and unable to find a sure-footed place to stand. But I don’t. Our beloved mother died from an overdose, and, even after a lifetime of a family that revolved around her depression, we didn’t see it coming in time to save her, and I can’t forgive myself for that. And more than that, there’s a stranger inside me, a stranger who is me, a crucial part of me I don’t have any reference for, and that unnerves me.

  ‘I think it will be a challenging few days, being here without her,’ I say instead, choosing my words carefully. ‘I’d always thought we’d come back here one day all together, you, me, Mum and Dad. I always thought there would be an end, like a resolution, and she’d be better, be happy. I never thought the ending would be that she’d—’

  ‘Kill herself,’ Pea finishes.

  ‘Christ.’ I bow my head, and the now-familiar surge of sickening guilt rises in my throat over the fact that I didn’t see what she was about to do. ‘How can it be real? How can that be what’s really happened? I didn’t see it coming. I should have seen it coming. I should have … but she seemed, better, brighter. Free. I relaxed, I shouldn’t have relaxed.’

  ‘Maybe it’s better that you didn’t,’ Pea says. ‘That we didn’t.’

  ‘Pia, how can you say that?’

  ‘Because. Because it wore her out, all that effort at being happy. For our whole childhood, painting on smiles just for us and Dad. She was exhausted by it, but she saw it through, because she loved us. I’d been clean for more than a year, you’d got your doctorate, and were going to move in with Brian. Dad was through the cancer scare. Don’t you think she finally thought that now we were all OK, she could just go? Just stop feeling the pain, and go. Don’t you think that’s why she seemed happier? The end was in sight.’