Dear Emmie Blue

by Lia Louis

  “I was really tired.” I stand and slot the scattered lavender back into the vase. “Got into bed and fell straight to sleep,” I lie. The truth is that I got home from Lucas’s yesterday, got into bed, and couldn’t face food, or even seeing a single face. Something about Eliot and what he’d said about chance, how he laughed at me. Something about Lucas letting me down with the lift to the port. Something about not being able to afford the taxi. Last night, I felt like I was sixteen again. Alone.

  “And how was it?”

  I look at Louise blankly.

  “France,” she says shortly.

  “Oh.” I ball the wet tissue in my fist. “It was nice. We went suit shopping. Lucas tried white.”

  “White?” Her mousy eyebrows raise, her mouth downturned at the corners as if to say, “So that’s what the youth of today think looks good, then, is it?”

  “It looked terrible,” I say, and Louise gives an exasperated sigh, as if despairing of the world, and says, “Of course it did. What was he thinking?”

  I don’t know, I want to say. I wish I knew. And a part of me wants to pour everything out to her, tell her I think he’s making a mistake, tell her I feel like he’s rushing this, that it’ll be just like backpacking, like so many things and relationships before, and that I have never felt so close to telling him how I feel. But the built-in, fourteen-year-long best-friend loyalty stops me. Because how dare I make this about me, when this should only be about him. About Marie. So I don’t. As much as Louise watches me now, wise, her eyes serious; eyes that have seen so many things in her seventy years that nothing much would faze her, I say nothing, and instead look around at the room—the vase with its flowers sitting neatly on the radiator cover, the carpet’s water stain now barely visible. “Well, the good news is your vase appears completely unscathed.”

  Louise gives a weak nod. “Suppose that’s something.”

  I look down at her on the step. “Do you need a hand?”

  “No. I’ll be fine.”

  I want to ask her if she’s sure, but I don’t press. I just tell her if she needs me, I’m home until eleven, then leaving for work. She gives a nod, and I go into the kitchen, make a cup of tea and two slices of toast. I think about the double shift ahead of me tonight as I set a tray—the lunch shift, followed by dinner—and plan a treat for tonight, for when I get back. It’s the only thing that gets me through some days, when the balls of my feet are burning, my back throbbing, and I know there is nobody to return home to. Small things. Ever-attainable things. They help. A bowl of soup in bed with a comfort-watch on the TV. The Leading Man, perhaps. A movie nobody has ever heard of, of course, starring Jon Bon Jovi, but a DVD I got for 99p when I was sixteen, from the Blockbuster bargain bin. It’s the only way I could afford to buy DVDs back then. It’s why most of my favorite films are those nobody has ever heard of.

  “The Leading Shat,” Lucas calls it, and of course I’ve told him that doesn’t even make any sense. It doesn’t even rhyme. “I tell you what else doesn’t make any sense,” he’d say.

  “That it didn’t win several Academy Awards?”

  “No, Em. The fact you voluntarily watch it over and over again.”

  I wash up the knife now, wipe down the counter, and tray in hands, on my way into the hallway, I find Louise still there. Not on the bottom step, but on the floor now, sitting with her back against the stairs. She looks up at me, then her papery eyelids close.

  “Would you like a hand up?”

  Louise pauses, then sighs raspily. “Please.”

  I place the tray behind me on the floor. “How is best for me to—”

  “Emmie, just give me your hands, please.”

  I widen my feet on the carpet and hold out my hands as I’m told. She takes them. Her hands are warm and dry, and she squeezes them so tightly as I pull, that her rings pinch my skin. Twice, Louise almost gets to standing, before she sits back down again, her poor face contorted, a dapple of sweat above her lip. On the third try she stands properly, letting go of one of my hands the second she’s up, and steadies herself holding on to the banister.

  “Do you need help getting to a seat or to the kitchen?”

  “I’m fine from here, thank you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite.”

  “Okay,” I say. “I’m upstairs if you need me.”

  I pick up my tray from the floor behind me as Louise shuffles off, purple velvet skirt skimming the carpet.

  “And Emmie?” she calls out.

  I stop on the stairs. “Yes?”

  “You have a package in the porch.”

  * * *

  “Emmie! Oh, Emmie, how are you?”

  Marie’s smiling, beautiful face fills the screen, the phone shaking in my hand. “Oh. Hi, Marie.”

  “Luke is in the shower. He is just coming out!” Then her face leans from the shot, and I hear her call out something to him in French. “Emmie is on the phone, my love.” She looks back at the screen, at me, white, straight-toothed smile ever fixed. “He will not be long. Are you okay?”

  I remember when I met Marie for the first time. It was in the winter of 2014, at a wine bar—all exposed brick and low lighting—and I remember how badly Lucas had wanted me to like her. “She’s seriously great,” he kept saying in the taxi on the way there. “I think you’ll really get on. She’s bubbly, you know? Really laid-back, really warm.” Lucas had had many girlfriends, most of which were so short-lived I’d never met them. I was sure I’d dislike her. I was living with Adam at the time, happy, I thought, but I know now, living in total denial. Denial of the butterflies I’d get every time Lucas would put his arm around me, talk into my ear over the loud music of a bar, breath against my neck, every time he’d fall drunkenly asleep beside me, and I’d wake and watch his eyelashes flicker against his cheeks. But he was right. She was great. We got on instantly. We clicked, as they say. And I’d thought, Well, that’s that, then, isn’t it? and I ignored those butterflies so expertly, they almost disappeared altogether. Lucas and Marie broke up four times in an on-off, disjointed three and a half years, after that. The final time because Marie was sure he had cheated with Australian Ivy on the business trip after she texted him something flirty, and Lucas was tired of the accusations.

  Marie gazes back at me now, smiling, but the corners of her brown eyes crinkle ever so slightly with puzzlement.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” I tell her. “Look, if it’s a bad time, I can call again later—”

  “No, no, absolutely not. It is fine. We can chat until he’s out, no? Tell me all about this book you have bought. Luke tells me you are the perfect best woman already.”

  “B-Book?” My mouth is dry, my hands still shaking, the parcel from Louise’s porch spilled out beside me on the bed.

  “He said you have a book you are using to help with suits and speeches and—”

  “Oh. Oh yes, my best man book.”

  “Yes!” Marie smiles a beaming smile and nods into the camera, and I can see from my face in the tiny postage stamp of a window above her bright eyes and smooth skin, that I look ashen and drained. It’s like Beyoncé is FaceTiming Marley’s Ghost. “Did I tell you, Emmie,” Marie says, “that my girlfriend is taking a bridesmaid class? Can you believe there is such a thing?”

  I’m not sure what I was expecting there to be in the parcel. Something I forgot I won on eBay. Perhaps a redirection from the flat or the old landlord, a collection of old posts or something. But I wasn’t expecting this—these. Seven of them. Marie chatters away, and I catch a glimpse of one of the envelopes in my lap, and my stomach lurches all over again, the way it does when you’re teetering at the top of a roller coaster. His writing. This is his writing. I know now that he writes his Es like back to front threes, in mixed capital letters and lowercase. I brush a finger over one. France. To think these came all the way from France, somewhere. Saint-Malo, maybe. I wonder if he looks like Jean. I wonder if he leaves the letter H off the beginning of English
words in his French accent, like Jean does. ’Oliday ’Orrible.

  “Oh! I leave you now,” says Marie, her gaze fixed off camera. “My turn to shower.” She turns back to the screen and smiles widely. “So lovely to speak to you, Emmie.”

  “You too,” I say quickly, desperate for the sight of Lucas to slide onto the screen. He’ll make sense of it. He’ll help, as he always does, to settle the dread, the unease in my stomach.

  He appears, shiny-skinned, wet-headed. “Hey,” he says, swiping a hand through his hair, screen wobbling as he settles on the sofa. “Sorry. I was in the shower.”

  “That’s okay.”

  Lucas stops, takes in my face. “Em, what’s wrong?”

  I hesitate, look down at the fan of envelopes in my lap. I look back up at him, an ocean away, and I wish so much he was right here, in this room, beside me.

  “I got a parcel today,” I tell him, my voice tiny. “And… it was full of cards. Birthday cards. To me.”

  Lucas stares into the screen, his eyebrows knitted together. “Right? Who from?”

  “My dad.”

  Lucas doesn’t react straightaway. He just stares into the screen, frozen, a bit like I was when I opened the first one. Unmoving. Not breathing. “Y-Your… dad?”

  I look down into my lap at the scatter of them. Seven. Seven children’s birthday cards, every envelope opened, no address on the front, just my name. I hold one up to the camera. There’s a pink elephant on the front of this one, its trunk curling into a number two.

  “There’re seven of them, Luke. And the handwriting on the parcel; it’s Mum’s.”

  Lucas brings a hand to his forehead, lips parted. “Shit, so… she’s had these, what, all along?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And decides to send them to you now? Why?”

  I think back to what she said at the festival. The sharpness to her words, the finality of them. That if it was what I wanted—finding my dad—then she knew I no longer needed her. “Okay,” I told her. “Okay.”

  My hands, clammy and cold, tremble, and my throat constricts as if it’s being squeezed. I can’t speak. I look down into my lap. “Daughter. You are 7 today!” stares back at me, and a picture of my seven-year-old self, obsessed with rabbits and hair clips and collecting key rings, flickers into my mind, like a video springing to life. She wanted her dad so desperately, that little girl. She dreamed of him, drew pictures of him, pretended men who smiled at her and her mum in supermarkets were him.

  “Shit, Em. I’m—are you okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I manage, my words mere squeaks, and the tears come easily. No warning. “She said he didn’t know about me, Luke. For my whole life, she told me he… She…” I bring my hands to my forehead, cold palms cooling my hot skin. I open my mouth to speak, but Lucas is nodding. He already knows everything I want to say. “I know,” he says softly. “I know, Emmie.”

  Tears keep coming, and I hide my face in my hands as they fall. All I can hear is his voice from my phone propped up in front of me in the folds of my duvet, the whooshing of blood in my ears.

  “I’m sorry, Em. It’s such a lot to take in. But listen, this could be the start of something, couldn’t it? We know now that your mum knows more than she let on. Em? Em, are you okay?” And when I look up again, I see Lucas, those familiar, soft gray eyes on me, narrowing with worry. Then I see Marie in the background, frozen, a thick, burgundy dressing gown tied at the waist. The three of us, staring back at one another.

  “I’m going to go,” I say.

  “Are you sure?”

  I nod.

  “Emmie, I think you need to talk to your mum,” says Lucas, and I nod again, quickly, finger already hovering over the button to hang up.

  “I’ll be okay,” I tell him. “I’ll text you.”

  I watch Lucas and Marie disappear to black on my screen and curl up into bed, pulling the sheets to my neck. Thirty whole years of wondering, hours of searching, dead ends, barking up wrong trees. Lucas is right. These prove Mum knows more than she said she did. These prove my dad knew about me. Thought of me. These seven cards—the seven messages inside, exactly the same—tell me my dad cared. About me.

  Dearest Emmeline,

  Happy Birthday.

  Thinking of you always.

  Love,

  Dad

  WhatsApp from 073622819199 in group “OPERATION STEN!!!!”:

  Hi guys and gals! It’s Tom Boding here. Luke gave me your numbers, so thought I’d start a group for operation STEN party. Stag/hen. Get it?! We’ve got best woman (hi Ems ;)), maid of honor (hi Lucille, stop us if you need to Google Translate lol!!!), brother of the groom (hi Eliot m8), and me, usher and legend :P

  WhatsApp from 073622819199 in group “OPERATION STEN!!!!”:

  Just thought it would be cool to have a place we can discuss ideas and touch base on this party shiz. Thoughts?

  WhatsApp from Eliot Barnes:

  STEN.

  WhatsApp from Eliot Barnes:

  legend.

  WhatsApp from Eliot Barnes:

  shiz.

  WhatsApp from Eliot Barnes:

  Who knew it could take only three words to make me hope for death?

  * * *

  “Right, I have an idea, Emmie. Lay down.”

  “What?”

  “Well, you’re always taking photos of me from above, so maybe you could lie down beside me and get some close-up, same-perspective—”

  “But isn’t the sand… wet?”

  Rosie tuts and pauses, splayed out on the sand at my feet. “Well, a bit but—”

  “You have to suffer for art?”

  “I was going to say a bit of wet sand is nothing when the end result is me looking like a frigging betty, actually.”

  I look down at Rosie sprawled out elegantly on the beach like a 1950s movie star, her sunglasses huge, her white kaftan fanning out around her on the ground, the pop of pink of her bikini shorts.

  “Fine,” I say. “But if Fox finds any sand on my back and makes me wear one of those smelly spare blouses again from Lost Property, I am coming straight for you.”

  Rosie laughs, the apples of her cheeks glittering with bubble gum–pink blush. “Come on down, baby.”

  I do as I am told, and crouch to lie beside Rosie on the cushiony, wet sand. Spots of water pierce my shirt. “Terrific.” I grimace, and Rosie grins at me, a dimple in each cheek.

  “This is a bit cozy, isn’t it, Emmie Blue?” she says.

  “Most romantic position I’ve been in for ages, to be honest.”

  “Can you imagine Fox’s face if he was here?” Rosie says. “You do realize that the precipitation has rendered the sand utterly unfavorable for a photographic shoot, you fools.”

  “You unfastidious fools.”

  We both laugh, there on the wet beach, the summer sun high in the sky, Rosie in her new “gifted” kaftan from an Instagram-famous, plus-size fashion brand, and me in my hotel uniform of white blouse, name badge, and drab black trousers I often hope find their way to Lost Property, to never return. A man walks by us, a border collie trotting at his side, and he slows, staring at us as if we have just squatted naked in the street. I often find myself in these positions with Rosie.

  Rosie is a fashion and beauty blogger, and almost every lunchtime it’s her blog she works on, either writing posts at her desk littered with coffee mugs and empty sandwich wrappers, or taking photos in various outfits I wouldn’t have the first clue how to put together. The only time Rosie doesn’t spend them working on her blog is when the builders are back working on the hotel, when she will invite me to have lunch in the courtyard behind the kitchen, where she will admire with wonder the worker with all the tattoos, the way Attenborough admires mating seals. Last time they were here, we watched them over sandwiches and tea, and when Fox approached and asked how long we’d be sitting there “wondering which poor bugger is single,” Rosie said, “Actually, Fox, I’m wondering how good the one who looks
like Bradley Cooper is at giving head.” Rosie is smart and bold and has a confidence that rubs off and makes those around her walk a bit taller. Rosie is how confident I aspire to be.

  “Get the bracelets in,” she says now as I snap away at her with her new iPhone.

  “I’m trying.”

  “Try and get the light reflecting off the topaz one.”

  I stop and look over the phone at her. “Rosie, I’m a waitress with a fucking iPhone. I am not David Bailey.”

  After a few moments, Rosie rolls over onto her front and I hand back her phone. “Thank you.” She smiles at me, unscrewing the top to a bright pink smoothie. The beach may be damp from a night of summer rainfall, but the air is warm and smells like deep-fried doughnuts and seaweed, and there isn’t a cloud to be seen in the sky. It is on days like these that I love Shire Sands. The novelty of living here, with its small, sandy beach, its orange-bricked Victorian houses, the chintz of the arcades, has never truly worn off. I knew I wanted to live here the second I stepped off the train. I’d made the decision to move after that first year of college finished, and Lucas and Amanda had come with me, helping me move two towns over from Ramsgate.

  “A new start,” Amanda had said, positioning daffodils in the windows of the tiny studio flat I’d started renting. “You deserve that, my darling. You’ll be happy here.” And she was right.

  Rosie sips at her smoothie. “Talk to me, Blue.”

  “What about?”

  She leans and touches her arm to mine. “Whatever’s been giving you that face all week. The constipated face. Where you look like you have a small village jammed up your arse.”

  I laugh, picking out a petrol-blue mussel shell wedged in the sand. “I do not have that face.”

  “You do. You always do when you’re thinking too hard about something. What is it? Is it the Frenchman?”

  No, I want to say. Today there is something overriding Lucas: the seven birthday cards. From my dad. I can’t get them out of my head, and it has put my stomach into a constant churn ever since. I have spent a week with a ball of nerves, of sadness, and even a shred of excitement, in my chest. Excitement because I know I am closer to finding him, closer to the day I look my dad in the face. The man I am half of.