Dear Emmie Blue

by Lia Louis

  And like that, Eliot walks away.

  “Steve Fellows,” says the man on the doorstep, stretching out a chubby, clammy hand. “We spoke on the phone. About Miss Louise Dutch.”

  Steve Fellows sits opposite me on the two-seater, and I sit in Louise’s armchair, running my fingers over the armrest cover, embroidered with flowers she did herself before her eyesight got worse. The solicitor fiddles with a thick envelope and I bend my head, to put my nose to the arm. I can smell her still. Patchouli. Everything patchouli; on her pillows, in her bath, and on her skin, and I never figured out if it was pure, or a perfume she probably handmade herself. She burned incense in the conservatory of the same smell too. God, I miss her more than ever right now. I miss her cool hand on mine, her telling me off, rolling her eyes at me for thinking too much, for being too “wet.” She’d know what to tell me. She’d know what to say to make things seem less hopeless.

  “You are Ms. Emmeline Blue.”

  I nod. “I am.”

  “You have been Miss Dutch’s lodger for the last two and a half years.”

  “Correct.”

  “Miss Dutch and I met several weeks ago, when she understood her time was very limited.”

  “She did?” I ask. “I mean. She knew?”

  He swallows, adjusts the collar at his thick neck, red with what looks like a shaving rash. “She has always known, I am afraid.” He pauses. “We sent flowers. My partner and me.”

  Three bouquets turned up at the house that morning of the funeral. One from the butchers in town. Another from the staff at a garden nursery. And another: purple gladioli with white daisies.

  “Steve and Jude?” I say, and he nods, smiling. “They were beautiful. Thank you. Eliot—my friend. He took them to the woodland, to where she was laid to rest.” Saying his name makes my stomach ache with longing. I miss him so much, I could cry. Hot, heavy tears. Tears I have been crying every single day, hoping that’ll be the end of them, but it never seems to be. They are bottomless. It’s been four weeks since the wedding and nothing much of anything has happened. And I mean that. I have become stagnant and sad. Lost. Lucas and Marie had jetted off on their two-week honeymoon three weeks after the wedding; and from Eliot, I have heard nothing from him. But then, he’s about three thousand miles away. In Canada. I hadn’t realized, although I had an inkling, but then Lucas called me from his honeymoon suite in Guadeloupe.

  “Marie’s bought you a hand-carved avocado,” he laughed, and I admit, it did make me smile. Then he’d taken a breath down the line. “Anything?” is all he’d asked, and despite myself, despite promising myself I would try so hard to keep them dammed, I’d started crying, enveloped in my duvet, curtains closed, at past noon.

  He’d sighed. “But we talked. And he was quiet, yeah, but he listened, and I thought—I thought once he cooled off, once he got there, to Mark’s, he’d text. Call. I’m sorry, Em.”

  “He’s not been online once,” I’d said through the tears. “He’s definitely there, right?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I know he called Mum,” he said. “And he will call, Emmie. I know El, and I know he will. He’s just getting his head together.”

  Eliot had left after he came to my hotel room, and I had been sure to grab Lucas, at the hotel breakfast buffet, moments later, on his own. The color had drained from his face and he’d whisked outside to call him. They’d talked. But he’d said he needed space. Then Amanda, unaware and oblivious, had told Lucas a few days later that he’d had flown out to Canada.

  “Probably needs to get away from Ana, throw himself into his work,” she’d said to Lucas. “For a therapist, she’s acting frightfully scorned. Your dad reckons she’ll boil the cats given half a chance.”

  And I can’t bear to really think about it. Canada. I feel a surge of panic soar through my chest at the thought of being so many miles and oceans away from him. Perhaps that’s why he hasn’t been on WhatsApp or on Instagram. I remember what he’d said about Mark’s place. About how after his divorce, he’d canceled all outstanding work over here and got on a plane.

  “It’s the sort of place you go to reset. Switch off from everything for a while. Mend.”

  And the thought of him needing to mend, because of me, breaks my heart.

  Steve undoes a button on his blazer now, and sits back in the chair, shirt buttons stretching against a rounded tummy. “I stayed with Louise in my twenties. Lodged here, like you,” he says. “And I came back a few years ago while Jude and I were renovating the house. He stayed with his mum.”

  “You invited her for Christmas,” I say, and he smiles. “And she mentioned you visited. An old tenant, she said, and I teased her, pretended to die of shock at the sight of two mugs washed up, instead of one.”

  “Yes,” he chuckles. “Louise kept to herself, that’s one way of putting it. But she was fiercely strong and fiercely kind too.”

  “Yes,” I say. “She really was.”

  He clears his throat and pulls out a handful of paper, stapled at the corner. I take it and look down at them in my hands. “Right,” he says. “So, this is Louise’s last will and testament. You’ll see here that this is a document stating your name at the top.”

  “Okay.”

  “And then below, you’ll see there is a sentence that begins that in the event of Louise’s death, the property of Two Fishers Way…”

  I blink to focus on the neat, typed words on the page.

  “Why am I… why am I on this?”

  He smiles, hands clasping together. He takes a breath. “She’s left the house to you, Emmeline. It’s yours.”

  “W-What? No,” I say. “No, that’s—that’s… no—”

  “Yes. Yes. It’s yours.”

  I can’t speak. I can’t move. I am rigid in this chair, the blood flooding to my feet, the color I know, without even looking into a mirror, has drained from my face. This house. This beautiful Victorian house, with the gardens front and back. A house like those I would walk past on the way to school, dreaming I’d have one day, to raise a family inside, like Georgia’s, like the kids at school, paddling pools in the garden, dinners eaten at kitchen tables. This three-bed house with flowers in the windows.

  Steve talks again, but his voice sounds as though it’s underwater.

  “I understand this is a shock,” he says, but he cannot hide his amusement at my reaction as he carries on with the formalities, about what will happen next, and I try desperately to take in the words so they feel real. But it still feels utterly unfeasible. I have a house. I have a house in my name. A house. A home. I look around the lounge, my eyes lingering on all of her things, and I cry, silently, on the armchair. Because I want to put my arms around her. I want to tell her thank you. I want to hear her raspy voice say, “That’s quite all right, Emmie. Now, come on. No need to be so wet.”

  Steve explains the formalities to me, the processes, the things that will happen next, but I can hardly take it in, my hands shaking, my teeth chattering—the shock, Steve says—and in the end, he takes himself off to the kitchen and makes me a sugary tea, and stays, waiting to see that I finish it all.

  “I’ll call in a few days,” he says as he unlocks his car. “Let it all sink in.” Then he opens the car door. “Almost forgot,” he says, reaching inside. He hands me a plain, white, sealed envelope. “This is for you,” he says. Then he brandishes a plastic carrier bag. “And these are for an Eliot Barnes. From Louise. Her crossword books. She said he was always good at the obscure music ones.”

  * * *

  Dear Emmie Blue,

  A nice three-bed semi, a family, and someone to love you. You have all three now, if you just stop and look.

  All my love,

  Louise

  “It smells like a teenage boy in here.”

  “Great. Amazing. Thanks.”

  “Like old washing and—”

  “Disappointment,” Fox adds, and his hand gently squeezes my shoulder from behind me as I stand in the doorway looking into
Louise’s dark, still-cluttered lounge. “I mean, I never thought I’d say this, Emmie, but even Rosie’s place is cleaner than this.”

  I look up at him. “So, you’ve seen her place, now, have you?”

  Fox clears his throat. “Never you mind the things I’ve seen. You need to turn your attention”—Fox grabs my head with two hands and angles it up and down the hallway, once into the living room again, then to the kitchen overflowing with dirty plates—“to your living quarters.”

  “I mean, he speaks like a dick, but he’s right, Emmie,” says Rosie, coming to stand next to me, rain mac still on. “It’s a mess in here. I know you cleared a lot of Louise’s stuff out, but this is a job bigger than you, I reckon. And it’s time you let other people help. Like us. Your mates. Let us help you.”

  “Yes,” says Fox. “But first, you need to go and get in that shower.”

  I am relieved to see them today, barging through the hallway, bags of groceries at their sides. I have been off work with a cold, but Rosie has diagnosed it a broken heart.

  “But I can’t breathe through my nose,” I’d told her in protest on the phone this morning.

  “Nose. Heart. It’s all the same, Emmie. I got diarrhea when Alan dumped me. Shit my life away. And this is what this is. It’s normal. But you’ve got to let us look after you. Can we come round later? Fox and me.”

  Instincts urged me to tell her I was fine, but instead I said, “Please,” and I meant it.

  I am emotionally floored. That’s how I would describe myself at the moment. Floored and exhausted from living on a cocktail of such high emotions, and such low ones too. High, because Two Fishers Way is now mine. My home. And I am utterly staggered at the prospect of being a homeowner, overnight. The bills. The upkeep. And of course, the scope, the possibilities of everything this beautiful house could be. And the lows of missing Eliot. Of days and weeks passing since I’ve felt his strong arms around me, seen his face, heard his voice, watched the comforting sight of “typing” next to the gorgeous circle of a photo of him on WhatsApp, and waiting, smiling, for his next message.

  “You’re running on nothing but adrenaline,” Rosie had said, packing me off upstairs with a towel. “Your amygdala is having a hoedown. We need to chill it out. Shower first. The rest, later.”

  And that’s where I am now. Showering, at Fox and Rosie’s request. My friends. My family. Two people I have realized I trust with everything, and two people who are clattering pots downstairs, and firing up vacuums and washing machines, all for me.

  I wash my hair, and then blow-dry it. I open the curtains and throw up the windows in my bedroom and get dressed into proper clothes. Jeans. A tank top. It’s turned warm since we entered April, and outside, new leaves the color of gooseberries begin to grow on the old oaks.

  I tread downstairs, and already the house appears brighter. I can smell lemon disinfectant and hear Rosie shouting something to Fox from the kitchen to him in the living room, over the loud whoosh of the vacuum.

  “Much better,” says Rosie, rubber gloves on, wiping down the now clear sink. Everything washed up and put away.

  “Thanks, Rosie,” I say, and she nods to the table.

  “Sit down. I’ll make us a cuppa, then Fox is going to make lunch. And then you’re gonna get your life in order. The moping cycle has officially ended.”

  * * *

  Rosie and Fox stay for four hours, cleaning, scrubbing, helping me bag up some of Louise’s things, which they take for the local charity shops when they leave. The kitchen and bathroom sparkle, and Fox has somehow made the cluttered, dusty living room cozy and warm-feeling. It smells like furniture polish, and before he leaves he lights some candles I didn’t even know I had. Rosie has even made dinner for later—a curry that smells like coconuts. Something she said her dad makes when she’s run-down or sad.

  “It works. I give less of a shit once I’ve got a bowl of this baby. My nan’s works the best, though. Fuck knows what she puts in hers. Men’s souls, probably, and rightly so.”

  And I feel lighter having been with them. We laughed most of the afternoon, chatting, bundled on the sofa, over sandwiches and cups of tea, and it was nice seeing the little looks they threw each other, all sticky eyes and beaming smiles.

  “You really like him,” I’d whispered to Rosie, and she had put her fingers to her lips. “Shut up,” she replied, wide-eyed, then we’d giggled when she said, “I think I fucking do, you know.”

  I sit now at the kitchen table, gazing out the window, the radio on as Louise always had it after dinner. I miss her, when I sit here, looking at the chair she’d sit in. I remember the way seeing her here, in the mornings, comforted me, made me feel less alone. So many meals we ate together at this table, and how much we’d laugh when Eliot joined us. I gaze now out of the window, up at the stars. The Eta Aquariids are soon. In two weeks, I think. There’s a pull in my heart at the thought. It actually hurts. I just want to talk to him. Hear his voice. Say his name out loud.

  I pick up my phone from the table and before I’ve even let myself mull it over, let my fear, my heart talk me out of it, I press a thumb to his name. Voice mail, as usual. Instantly voice mail, the way it is when a phone is switched off. I never leave voice mails. But this time, I can’t bring myself to hang up.

  The beep sounds.

  “Hi, Eliot,” I say, bright, breezy. “It’s just me. I was just wondering how you’re getting on down there. Or—up there. We definitely know geography isn’t my strong point, eh? Ha. Yeah, um, it’s no big deal. I just wondered how you were, how you’re settling in. It’s getting warmer here, and in true Brit style, I’ve already seen a few bare chests in the aisles of Tesco as if it’s Saint Barts in August. Bet you’re missing us over here now I’ve mentioned that!” I pause. Chuckle. Heart racing. “But yeah. Um. We haven’t talked in weeks and… I just wanted to know you were okay. But listen, don’t worry about calling back. It was just a quick call to check in, really. Anyway. Better go. Loads to do! Speak soon!”

  My cheeks are raging hot when I hang up, and I feel sick. At the brightness. At the breeziness. I miss him. I miss him so much that it hurts, and the sadness in his face before he left that hotel room door replays in my mind. The way he was with Louise does too. With Marv. Everything he did for me. And I call him and practically sing down the phone? What am I doing?

  I call again, cheeks burning even hotter now. Voice mail again, of course.

  “Hi,” I say this time. “I’m sorry. I—I rambled like an idiot and sounded like I really didn’t care if you called me back or not, but… I do. I really do. And I forgot to tell you again that I’m sorry, Eliot. I’m sorry for the mess that I am, and… I miss you. I really miss you. And I wish you were here, actually. But. Canada deserves you. With all its… maple syrup and pretty blondes in furry hats and snow and… I hope you’re well. I hope you’re happy. Bye, Eliot.”

  I hang up. The house is silent, besides the soft mumble of the radio. I look around at the now glistening kitchen. My kitchen. I look at Louise’s empty chair. I look at the pot of gingery, coconut curry on the hob.

  Order. I need order in my life. Rosie’s right. The wallowing cycle is up. It’s time to find out who I am. Without Balloon Boy. Without the fear Robert Morgan planted within me, like an arrow I couldn’t pull out, the night of the Summer Ball. Who am I, without the fear of that one night? Without Eliot. Without the need for anyone to complete me. Mum. Marv. A partner. Children. Eliot told me once I was enough, without all of that. And like the constellations and stars and obscure music facts, he is right.

  I am enough.

  I click open the padlock of the notebook Eliot bought me and turn to the first fresh page. And with Louise’s golden pen, I make a list.

  * * *

  To: Emmie.Blue@gmail.co.uk

  From: noreply@jobs.site.uk

  Date: April 10, 2019

  Dear Ms. Emmie Blue,

  Thank you for expressing interest in the position of Junior Counselor
for Fortescue Lane Secondary School. This email is to confirm that we have received your application and will be in touch shortly, should the employer wish to organize an interview.

  I only remember one Easter in my life, and that was when I was seven. Den and I went to an egg hunt at the local park, and when we got home, we cooked messily, over multiple open recipe books, a roast dinner. Lamb. Potatoes. Peas that Den insisted we stirred mint sauce into. We all sat at the table that afternoon—Den, Mum, and me—and I remember staring out of the window as we ate, willing people to walk by, on their Sunday afternoon walks, and to look in, to see how much we looked like all those families on TV. To wish they could join us. Tomorrow will be the first Easter I’ve celebrated since then. And I’ll be with my dad. I will be with my sister. I’ll be with my family.

  “What do eighteen-year-old law students even like?” I’d asked Rosie.

  “It’s Easter, Emmie. You don’t need to take presents. You don’t know them yet.”

  “But I feel I should. What about flowers for Carol?”

  “How about you take dessert?” she suggested. “Louise must have loads of recipe books knocking about on those shelves of yours.” And that’s when I decided to make a cake. Something of Louise’s; a recipe from the little homemade recipe book she kept in the tote bag that never left her side. Some handwritten. Some handed down. Some cut from magazines. “It’s full of recipes I’ve collected since I was about twenty-five,” she’d told me once. “Everything in there works like a charm. As dependable as dogs, those recipes, every last one of them.”

  I don’t often go into Louise’s room. Her wardrobe is still stuffed with her clothes, but I’ll get to it soon. One step at a time. Because that’s what I’m doing now. One small step forward at a time, until I gather enough distance, that when I look over my shoulder, I can barely see those things in the past that held me back for so long.