The Story of Us

by Dani Atkins

  I opened the driver’s door almost before the handbrake was fully engaged, and although I knew I was moving at speed, everything seemed slowed down and dreamlike. The illusion shattered as my dad burst through the front door like a charging bull. His hair was dishevelled and wet, so I knew his search had already extended beyond the interior of the house. His eyes were what scared me though; wild and desperate, as though he was already tumbling down into a steep well of panic. I tried to force myself to breathe calmly and evenly, but it wasn’t easy. Panic is as infectious as the plague, and just as deadly.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, grabbing hold of both of his arms and forcing him to stop his headlong charge back into the rain, to look at me. It was a stupid question. I knew exactly what was wrong, so hastily amended it. ‘How long has she been missing?’ He shook his head so hard that little droplets of rain showered down from his hair. ‘I don’t know. Fifteen minutes… twenty… maybe even longer. Oh God, I just don’t know.’

  ‘Calm down, Dad. Breathe. Just tell me what happened.’

  ‘It’s all my fault. She was fast asleep in the armchair, she nodded off during her programme, you know how she does?’ I nodded, impatient to cut through the details that would do nothing to help us find her. ‘I had a couple of letters that needed to catch the post. And she was so soundly asleep that it seemed a shame to wake her to come with me, so I just thought, it’s only five minutes to the post box, I’ll be back before she knows I’ve even gone. But then I bumped into that Debbie woman from the chemist, and you know how she likes to talk… and then, when I got back here the door was wide open…’

  ‘It’s all right, Dad. We’ll find her. We always do.’ Until, of course, the time comes when we don’t, a voice whispered in my head. ‘Have you searched the house?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Every room?’ He gave me a withering look. ‘Sorry. Of course you have. All right, we’ll split up. You take the street and then if you don’t find her there, try the path that leads down to the forest for that walk she likes, okay?’

  He pulled himself together with a visible effort. ‘I’m sorry, Emma.’

  I gave him a quick hard hug. ‘It’s not your fault, Dad. You know that. You can’t watch her twenty-four/seven. It’s just not possible.’ There was a granite-like determined glint in his eyes, which I knew meant he totally refuted my words, but now was neither the time nor the place to rehash the argument we’d been having on and off for almost all of the last year.

  ‘I’ll try the school first,’ I told him, already turning to go, ‘and if she’s not there, I’ll call you and we can work out where to look next.’

  ‘Do you think we should phone the police?’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s too soon for that, Dad. It’s not even been half an hour. Let’s try all the likely places first and see where we go from there.’

  I turned on my heel and raced back to my car. Phoning the police was extreme, a last resort, and hopefully a totally unnecessary option. This time. But there was going to come a day when we didn’t find my mum walking around, lost and confused somewhere near her home. It was just a question of when.

  It was difficult driving so slowly on the route to the school, when every instinct was telling me to put my foot to the floor and get there as fast as possible. But I knew from experience that I needed to keep my attention on not just the road ahead of me, but also on the pavements and even the front gardens of the houses flanking either side of the street. The last time I had found her in someone’s garden, sitting on a child’s swing, idling swaying backwards and forwards, without any comprehension or idea of the panic her disappearance had caused. But at least Richard had been driving on that occasion, so it had been much easier to scan through the hedges and bushes that hid the properties from view.

  As satisfied as I could be that she wasn’t in any of the gardens I had driven past, I turned left on to the main road and headed for one of the places which drew her like a magnet. I shuddered as a van overtook me, sending a cascade of muddy rainwater down my windscreen. This was my nightmare, my real dread. That she would just walk out into the road. While this illness was busy robbing you of your personal identity and memories, did it bother leaving you the rather vital instinct of self-preservation? How far down the slippery slope did you have to tumble before you didn’t know any better than to step out in front of a speeding vehicle?

  My hands gripped the steering wheel like talons, as the fear I hadn’t let my father see coursed through me like a virus. And I was angry too, not at Dad, never at him. All he was trying to do was hang on to Mum for as long as he could; I knew that better than anyone. No, I was mad – way beyond mad – I was furious with myself. I’d been so absorbed in myself recently, I hadn’t been paying attention where I should have been. These ‘episodes’ that Mum had normally came with a set of warning signs. She’d become even more woolly or forgetful and emotional and if nothing else, it at least made us all even more watchful. But I’d been so distracted with the accident and losing Amy, worrying about Richard’s strange behaviour, and the disquieting feelings – which I was trying to ignore – that I was feeling for Jack, that I’d taken my eye off the ball. Big time. And now here was the wake-up call. Hopefully, please God, not too late. I shouldn’t be giving head space to things I couldn’t change, and certainly not to some pathetic schoolgirl crush. This was real. This was what I’d come home for, to help.

  I pulled into the school’s sweeping forecourt and instantly let out a grateful cry of relief. I stepped on the brakes and pulled my mobile from my pocket. ‘She’s here, Dad. I’ve found her.’

  There was a long moment of silence, which I knew he was using to compose himself, and when he eventually spoke his voice was unusually gruff. ‘Thank God. Just bring her home. And Emma… drive safely.’

  Anxious not to spook her, I slowed my car down to a crawl and pulled into one of the parking bays beside the Art Department. The rain was still pounding down with vicious intensity, and Mum had no coat on. I pulled a plaid picnic blanket from the back seat and got out into the driving rain. She looked up at my approach, and I covered the last of the distance between us with deliberate nonchalance. I knew how to play this.

  ‘Hi, Mum. What are you doing?’ Unfortunately the casual tone I was striving for was lost when I looked down and saw she was still wearing the pink bobble-front slippers I had bought her for Christmas. Only now they looked like sodden and squelchy furry road-kill. And that was what started me crying – not the Alzheimer’s that had stolen my mother from me, not the fear that I felt every time she went missing, but the stupid ruined slippers. I brushed the tears away angrily with the back of my hand, hoping she would think it was raindrops I was wiping away.

  ‘I’ve lost my keys, Emma,’ she explained, indicating the upended handbag, whose contents were scattered in a metre-wide circle on the tarmac. It reminded me of that game that we used to play at children’s parties, Kim’s Game I think it was called, where you memorise a whole load of inconsequential items. The one with the best memory won the game. Guess there were no prizes for working out who today’s biggest loser would be?

  I dropped into a crouch and began to gather up the random belongings housed in Mum’s bag: purse (with no money in it, because she never went shopping alone); a wallet full of credit cards (all cancelled, just in case she did); her favourite brand of perfume (which still reminded me of my childhood and being held close in her arms whenever I smelled it); and a dozen other bits of handbag paraphernalia. I scooped all of it into the already waterlogged bag. The only thing I didn’t pick up were the keys she had been looking for, the keys to the Art Department. Because she hadn’t had those for over three years, since she stepped down from being Head of Art and then from teaching altogether, as the symptoms of her illness became harder to ignore. She hadn’t worked here for a very long time indeed. But sometimes she forgot that.

  I was very glad the Easter weekend offered me time to do some serious thinking and
prioritising. And priority number one, which I sadly realised I had been neglecting recently, was my mum. That my father and I had both had a bad night’s sleep was obvious by the matching dark circles beneath our eyes the following morning. But when Mum had gone for her morning shower and I tentatively tried to raise the topic, I was met by his usual resistance.

  ‘Dad, you have to see that we can’t go on much longer like this,’ I had begun cautiously, once I knew she was definitely out of earshot.

  There was a dangerous obstinacy in his eyes as he raised them to mine. That’s where I got my stubborn streak from, or so Mum used to tell me, before she lost the key to the treasure trove of a lifetime’s memories.

  ‘Emma, I am not getting into this again. I am not going to put your mum in a home. Not while there is still breath left in my body.’

  ‘No one is saying that, Dad. But there are other options out there: day care, carers, organisations who understand what we’re going through. You can’t do this alone any more. No one could. I know you think you’re protecting her, but what you’re really doing is risking your own health. I worry about you, I don’t want you making yourself ill again.’

  His eyes clouded at my words, as we both thought back to the incident twelve months earlier, the one which had prompted my return home. I could still see him, grey faced and drawn, wired up to monitors at the local hospital as we waited to learn if his collapse had been due to a heart attack. That time it had just been angina, brought on by stress. Just. Next time he might not be so lucky.

  ‘I know you’re worried about me, and I love you for it, and for the way you put everything on hold to come back and help me. But this decision isn’t yours to make. It’s mine.’

  I sighed, and stirred the cooling coffee in the cup before me as I struggled to find an argument I hadn’t already attempted a hundred times before. ‘But if we found a really good place that could take her for just a few days a week? Just to give you a break when I’m not living here any more?’ I suggested, already knowing he would shoot down the idea before it had taken flight.

  I was right. He couldn’t have looked more horrified if I’d proposed he run off with one of the neighbours for a dirty weekend. ‘What? And just leave her there, like she was a dog we were dropping off at the kennels, because we want to go away and enjoy ourselves?’

  I pushed the coffee cup aside and reached for his hand, noticing obliquely how much more pronounced the wrinkles on the back of it were, than just a short while ago. He was aging faster than he should, and his retirement was now totally occupied with his unplanned new role as a twenty-four-hour carer for the woman he still loved with all his heart.

  ‘When it all gets too much, I’ll let you know,’ he advised, trying to temper his words with a grateful smile. ‘And having you and Richard around to help has made everything so much easier. And you won’t be that far away, even after you’re married.’

  There was a noise in my head, and it sounded an awful lot like a steel prison door clanging shut, but I didn’t let it show on my face as I gave my hopelessly optimistic and loving parent an answering smile. ‘No, we’ll be right here,’ I promised.

  Mum’s illness had all started so innocuously. Such a silly little incident, that I had no way of realising its foreboding significance. I had just returned from Washington and had come down from London to spend the weekend at home. I’d been looking forward to a quiet family meal, but actually what I got was a full-scale intervention, masquerading as Sunday lunch. ‘What, no fatted calf?’ I remember joking, as I opened the oven door and saw the enormous joint of beef roasting in its tin. ‘Christ, Mum, there’s only three of us for lunch, you and Dad are going to be eating leftovers for days.’ She had looked a little abashed then, as she’d gathered up an armful of cutlery from the drawer. That should have alerted me that it wasn’t just us for lunch. ‘Actually, I’ve asked the Withers to join us too, to celebrate your return.’ She’d made a very hasty exit to the dining room, and with good reason. My face had probably been a very eloquent picture of just how I was feeling. It was too much to hope that she hadn’t included Richard in the invitation. Of course she would have. I wondered if Sheila, Richard’s mum, was in on it too? Neither of them had been shy about expressing their regret when we’d broken up, but this degree of matchmaking was taking things to a whole new level. I recall wondering if Richard was as much in the dark as I had been. Oh, this was going to make for a delightful lunch, I had thought.

  Then I’d heard my mum’s sharp cry of distress from the dining room. I dropped the oven gloves I’d been holding and ran to her aid, all anger gone. As I dashed across the hall, horrible visions of injury or heart attacks ran with me. But what had met me wasn’t the sight of my strong and capable mum physically debilitated. Instead, she had been standing at the head of the polished dining room table with the cutlery scattered in front of her, like a shiny silver mountain.

  ‘Mum, what is it? What’s wrong?’ I’d asked, crossing quickly to her side. I remember feeling terrified because her face was contorted in anguish and confusion, and tears were coursing down her carefully made-up cheeks in fast-flowing rivulets.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ she wailed in fear and despair.

  I looked around the room in confusion. ‘Do what? What can’t you do?’ I could see nothing in the familiar dining room to cause her this level of distress. Everything looked absolutely normal, except for my mum, of course. Nothing normal there. Nothing at all.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ she sobbed again, this time waving a hand in front of her to indicate the waiting cutlery. ‘I can’t lay the table,’ she cried and looked up at me with eyes as lost and helpless as a child’s. ‘I can’t remember how to lay the table. It’s gone… it’s just gone.’

  Of course we’d laughed it off. We had to. I had calmed her down, and laid the table myself, and once the task was done she had seemed to pull herself back together and had appeared almost normal again. I think we even made a silly joke about it, unbelievably. I suppose if we’d done anything else, we’d have been opening the door to the demon even sooner than we had to. But he was on his way, and it wasn’t long before he became an all-too-frequent uninvited visitor at our house. It had begun.

  As frequently happened after one of her episodes, in the days following my mother’s pilgrimage to her old place of work, she appeared much more settled and connected with the present. She even expressed a desire to paint, and as he set up the easel, canvas and brushes, the tools of her former trade, my father had given me a look which eloquently said, See. Everything is fine now. I wondered if he actually believed that.

  Richard, at least, was able to offer his support, even if it was only via a lengthy late-night conversation on our mobiles, which we’d probably both regret when next month’s bills came in.

  ‘We just have to go along with what your dad thinks is best,’ he had said reasonably.

  ‘I know,’ I sighed, ‘but what if I hadn’t found her? What if next time she gets lost, or hurts herself… or worse? He’d never forgive himself if anything like that ever happened.’

  There was a silent buzzing on the line, and for a moment I wondered if we’d been disconnected. Then, when he eventually spoke, there was real sadness in his voice. ‘You can’t live your life like that, being afraid of the what ifs. You can’t predict the future; you just have to make the most of what you have, while you’ve got it. Everything can change so quickly…’ His voice trailed away, and I wondered if he was suddenly regretting the path our conversation had taken. It was inevitable that his words would make us both think of Amy. But he was right. Amy had embraced that philosophy as though it were a religion: live for today, tomorrow will take care of itself.

  Talking to Richard left me feeling more grounded and settled than I’d done in days. He was right about so many things: about my parents; about not worrying about the future; and also, about us.

  ‘I don’t want to wait a long time before rescheduling the wedding,’ he had said
.

  ‘But won’t people think it’s wrong, or disrespectful, if we do it too soon?’

  ‘Screw what anyone else thinks. This is about you and me. And let’s be honest, would it have worried Amy? Well, would it?’

  I shook my head, which was a stupid thing to do on the phone, but suddenly there was a tightness in my throat, as I could almost hear her voice saying the very same thing that Richard had done, except perhaps even more colourfully.

  ‘Okay. Let’s talk about it when you get back,’ I agreed.

  I sat at the kitchen table the following morning, turning the small brown package over and over in my hands, cautiously, as though it contained an unexploded bomb. I gave an impatient snort at the ludicrous thought. It was a book. Just a book. I dealt with hundreds of them every day of the week. I was being ridiculous.

  If I had managed to figure out nothing else over the Easter weekend, one thing at least was clear: for some reason – and I’m really sure it was due to how we met – I found Jack strangely compelling, and that connection drew and repelled me like the poles of a magnet. So the last thing I needed to do was get him even further into my head by reading his book. I should just throw this unopened package into the kitchen bin, have no further contact with him, and allow all these confusing feelings to just fade away. Simple. So why then did I hear a small tearing noise and find that my fingers – following their own separate agenda – had ripped open the parcel?

  It was a hardback edition, with a shiny glossy black cover and eye-catching artwork. I flipped it open and read the front blurb, which told me nothing about the novel that I hadn’t already gleaned from the internet when I’d ordered it. I went to the back. My breath caught in my throat as I looked at the picture of the man who had saved me. It was a smiling, relaxed, outdoor shot of him leaning up against a tree. Behind him was a ranch-style fence, and his casual clothing of jeans, open-necked shirt and boots all completed the general ‘cowboy’ outdoorsy image, which I imagined the photographer had been striving for. Jack looked younger in the portrait, and his hair was a little longer, and possibly the small creases that fanned from his eyes when he smiled weren’t quite as pronounced as they’d been the other day when he was looking at me, but otherwise— I snapped the book shut with a noisy smack, as though a coiled serpent had just reared up from its pages. And this is why I should just bin the book, I thought grimly, because for whatever reason, being around Jack – even looking at a picture of him, apparently – was as intoxicating to me as a drug. And just about as dangerous. I needed to kick this irrational addiction before it took an even stronger hold, and concentrate on the things that were really important in my life: my family; my fiancé and my friends, and trying to return to some sort of normality after losing Amy.