Captive Hearts

by Harper Bliss

  “It’s hard to say, of course, because it’s been so long now, and I only remember the best parts of him. And, at his best, I’m not saying he wouldn’t have minded, but I don’t think he would have objected to it the way Mum has. I bet she wished she could have had my other parent present for this, to ask him for advice on how to handle it all. I like to believe that he would have put his hands on my shoulders the way he used to do, and said, “Joy Perkins, you go out and live your life and don’t compromise.”

  “I can see him saying that.” It’s true. Don’t compromise was Paul’s go-to phrase. Then, a stumbling noise in the hallway makes us jump.

  “Oh, shit.” Joy seems frazzled as well. “I’ll go see if it’s Mum or Jeff.” Joy slips from underneath the covers and, chastely, puts on the robe that is hanging from the back of the bedroom door.

  When the door shuts behind her, I lie back, listening with one ear to the noise beyond the wall, and thinking about what a strange weekend it has already been—and it has only just started. Then, all I can think of is how much I hope Miranda will be okay. This family is so close to unravelling already, another cancer case will be the end of it—literally and figuratively. If the lump is malignant and Miranda doesn’t pull through, Joy won’t have any parents left alive anymore. That’s just not right for someone who hasn’t even turned thirty yet. Not that losing your parents is easy at any age—my own mother died of a stroke when she was sixty-eight, my father not long after, at the age of seventy-five, of a heart attack.

  “I’m genetically predisposed for cardiovascular disease,” I used to say to Miranda when she was on my case about my rigid workout schedule—which I’ve severely neglected since falling in love with Joy—and my healthy salads for lunch. “If I don’t do this, I may not make it past retirement.”

  “Keep working the way you do, and you won’t make it past sixty,” she said, which I always shrugged off because work always energised me more than it stressed me, but I see now that she had a point. Life is too fragile to just let it pass you by. I only have to think about the woman at the other end of the hallway to hammer that point home to myself.

  “It was just Jeff. He’s making breakfast in bed for Mum.” Joy drops the robe on the floor and clambers back into bed with me. “She’s still out like a light apparently.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t let you go,” I say out of the blue. “I’m glad I didn’t let anything stand in our way.”

  “I’m glad, too,” Joy says, while she slips her body half over mine. “And I love you, too.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  On Tuesday, I’m the one accompanying Miranda to her biopsy. Jeff offered to go with her, but Miranda wanted only me to come.

  “It’s a girl thing,” she told him, but I guess she wanted to spare him in a way. Being the spouse of a seriously ill person is no walk in the park, a fact Miranda is more than well aware of. “Besides, Alice and I need to catch up.”

  By then, we have had more personal conversations in one weekend than in the two previous months combined, culminating in a legendary statement from Miranda saying, “If this is benign and I don’t have cancer, you can even call me your mother-in-law, Alice. I will be so over the moon, and will have put everything in so much perspective, that I won’t give a damn anymore.” Granted, she uttered these words after a fair number of large G&Ts, but still, I hope to be able to remind her of them in due course.

  “Listen,” Miranda says now, “at the risk of sounding overly dramatic and like we’re starring in an episode of Casualty.” She grabs hold of my arm in the back of the taxi. “If anything happens to me, I mean, er, if worse comes to worst, promise me you won’t let Joy fall apart. Promise me you’ll be there for her, Alice, no matter what. I need to know that. I need you to promise me that.” There’s a hitch in her voice and she looks out of the window, unable to face me.

  “Nothing of the sort will happen to you.” I put a hand on hers, and I can feel that she’s trembling. She’s scared and nervous. So am I.

  “You don’t know that. When Paul first went into hospital, they gave him an eighty percent chance of survival and he’s been dead for fourteen years.”

  “I know, but at this stage… we don’t know anything yet, really.”

  “I know that I’m scared. I’m scared of my daughter having to lose me now after she’s already had to lose her father so young.”

  I can tell this is important to her, so I decide to humour her—even though all this talk is much too defeatist. “Whether it’s malignant or not, you will beat this, Miranda,” I say. “But, I promise you that, in the very unlikely case of anything happening to you, I will take care of Joy.” I hesitate. “I love her. I will do anything I can for her.” Did I go too far? Should I not have said that in front of Miranda, who is still looking out of the window?

  “I know you love her. Why else would you go through the torment of being with your best friend’s daughter? In the end, that has been the most consoling fact—perhaps the very thing that pushed me over the edge once I could think about it with a clear head. I know you so very well, and, in spite of accusing you of being menopausal and delusional, I know that you wouldn’t have chosen to be with her if you didn’t really, unequivocally, care for her and… love her.”

  “I know it’s hard,” I whisper, wondering what the cabbie must think, but then remembering Joy’s words from Saturday morning: I decided not to care anymore what anyone else thinks of me. “It’s been hard on me too.”

  Miranda inhales deeply and from the corner of my eye, I see her turning towards me. “You make her happy. She’s a different person now, although I assume the current circumstances have something to do with that as well. But I’ve never seen her this relaxed. So at ease with herself. Not since she came back from the States, where, let’s face it, she only fled to because she couldn’t bear Jeff living in our house and she wanted to punish me.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I still fail to grasp exactly what happened to me. Every single morning, I think to myself, is this really happening? But it is, and, what can I say? I’ve never been so happy either.”

  “I know. That’s what aggravated me the most about seeing you at the office. I was sitting there fuming while I could actually see the physical change in you. God, it only made it worse to think that my daughter had that effect on you. You’re not the same Alice as the one who left for Portugal. I should never even have suggested you take a break from work and insisted you go on holiday.” She gives a heartfelt giggle. “I basically pushed her into your arms.”

  “I should have disagreed with you more strongly when you called,” I reply.

  “I knew you wouldn’t protest too much, Alice. You’re simply too good-natured.”

  “Well, it is your house. What was I going to say?”

  Miranda grins. “I also know you would never have made the slightest move to seduce Joy, not even if you were suddenly experiencing feelings for her. I know full well how she prances about the villa, without a care in the world or a shred of clothing on her body. Believe me, Alice, I insisted she not do that while you were in the house with her. I explicitly told her how uncomfortable that would make you feel. But Joy doesn’t listen to me when it comes to certain matters. Well, most matters, actually. Maybe I was too lax with her after Paul died, I don’t know. All I know is that when that girl sets her mind to something, she usually gets it. Be it a college education in California or my best friend as her… her lover.”

  The taxi stops. We’ve arrived at the hospital. It’s go-time. I go through the registration process with Miranda, but I can’t go into the treatment room with her. I take a seat in the waiting area, and wait, all the while thinking that if this is our happy ending, it’s a really dubious one.

  * * *

  I’ve taken the entire day off to spend with Miranda. On the way back to her house, she’s quiet. It will take a week until we get the results and it’s going to be a long, agonising one.

  “Maybe you shou
ld go away,” I offer. “Go to Portugal. Start practicing for that early retirement you’re so keen on.”

  “God, Alice. I said some godawful things to you. I am sorry. I hope you know that.”

  “There’s really no need to apologise.”

  “There is. Last Friday, after I returned from that disastrous doctor’s appointment and the extra, unexpected tests I was subjected to, I went home and sat staring at my phone. I didn’t want to call Joy, because I didn’t want to alarm her unnecessarily. I was only going to tell her after I’d had the needle biopsy and if the outcome was bad because I didn’t want to scare her for nothing. I really, really wanted to call you, but then the spiral of gloomy thoughts started up again in my head. It was Friday late afternoon. You’d be on your way out, quite possibly to see Joy, and I got so angry again. Not because you were seeing Joy per se, but because you weren’t at my disposal.

  “You’re my friend, Alice. You have been for decades. And I needed you so badly in that moment, because nobody else would do. Not Jeff with his relentless optimism, nor any of my other friends, because they’re not you. They haven’t seen me at my worst the way you have. I knew that I could only accept the words ‘it’s going to be all right’ from your lips in that dreadful moment, and you weren’t available to me. That’s why I hit the sherry. Then I got so drunk not even Jeff could keep me from calling Joy. I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have done so many things. But hell, I was hardly thinking about the big picture. The only thing I could think of was how you had abandoned me for my daughter and, when I saw you at work, I wanted to scream, ‘What about me, Alice? What about all the time we used to spend together? What about my feelings?’” She grabs my hand again. I can hear her sniffing away some tears. “So, I am truly sorry for the way I treated you. Who am I to blame you for falling in love with someone as wonderful as Joy?”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I will gladly accept your apology, but I’m hardly innocent in this matter. I could have said no. I could have put you first, because I knew how hard this would be for you.”

  “But why would you do that? When, as long as I have known you, you have always put me first. You’ve held up the business while I was busy raising my child, when I lost my husband, and when I started working less. You have always been there for me, and the one time you needed my understanding, I turned into a monster.”

  “I think you’re being a bit too hard on yourself,” I say. “Neither one of us expected you to embrace our relationship. It’s a bit too complex for that.”

  “True, but I could have been easier on you; I could have been a tad more forgiving. Even Jeff asked me at a certain point whether I was willing to go as far as losing you both over it, while all you and Joy had done wrong in my eyes was fall in love.” She rummages in her purse for a tissue. When she doesn’t find one, I hand her one from the full packet I always carry with me. “The things I said to him after that.” She shakes her head while wiping her nose. “It wasn’t pretty.”

  “It’s all perfectly understandable,” I say, while rejoicing on the inside because, by the sound of it, I have my best friend back. I can only hope, with everything I have, that I get to keep her for a very long time to come.

  “Tell me it’s going to be all right, Alice. I need to hear it from you again.”

  “Miranda Jones. This time next week we’ll be having a massive party with bottle after bottle of champagne because we’ll be celebrating the good outcome of your biopsy. You’re my best friend and my life is not the same without you, so I simply refuse to lose you.”

  “Thank you.” She leans her head on my shoulder the way Joy does sometimes. And I notice how I’ve become much more comfortable with tactile displays of friendship. “Say, Alice, I have been meaning to ask you… now that you’re, er, a lesbian. Have you, uh, ever been attracted to me?”

  I guffaw at her question, then try to reply in a steady voice, “No, Miranda. It’s not like—”

  “I’m just pulling your leg, Alice.” She slaps my thigh.

  “For Christ’s sake.” I bump her away from me with my shoulder.

  After she stops snickering, because this is obviously very funny to Miranda, I say, “I never had the chance to tell you, but I ran into Alan a few weeks ago.”

  “You did?” She turns to me fully.

  “Yes. It was a really random encounter.” I don’t share with Miranda the reason for my long walk that day. “I just ran into him when I walked into a pub I’d never set foot in before. We sat down for a drink, but as soon as I sat across from him, I was appalled at the thought of spending any time at all with him. Not because I still hate him for leaving me for Sheryl. I got over that a long time ago. But because of what he stood for: everything I don’t want in a significant other. My life could have been so different if we hadn’t divorced, and it was as though I could see it flash before my eyes.”

  “Did he look that bad?” Miranda jokes.

  “No, not even. He looked like a perfectly acceptable middle-aged man. A man who takes proper care of himself and who’s comfortable enough in his skin.”

  “So…” Miranda begins. “Are you… a lesbian now?”

  “I don’t know.” I actually truly don’t. “If the singular definition of a lesbian woman is as simple as a woman who has fallen in love with another woman, then I guess I am.” I shrug. “I’m not too worried about defining myself, though. I am much more worried about keeping you as my friend.”

  “I will always be your friend, Alice. We’re like a couple in a very long relationship. We can basically finish each other’s sentences, but”—another pause—“maybe we will need some rules. You can talk to me about almost everything, of course, but when it concerns Joy, there will be certain things I don’t want to hear.”

  “I didn’t have a total personality transplant. I’m not in the habit of pouring out my heart to you. I will always be who I am in that regard.”

  “You can tell me all the things she refuses to, however, like what time she makes it home on the weekend, and if she’s doing any recreational drugs.” Miranda looks at me expectantly, then bursts into a smile. “I’m just kidding.” She chews her bottom lip for an instant. “All jokes aside. You have changed. You have less of a stick up your arse, if I may be so bold as to use such language.”

  “Only today,” I reply. “Today you can say anything you want to me.”

  “What do you mean only today? I could very well have cancer next week, Alice. At least give me until then.”

  “You don’t have cancer,” I say, my voice sounding much more convinced than I ever, realistically, could be. “Who’s going to give me hell if you do?”

  Seconds later, the taxi pulls up to the curb of Miranda’s house. When we go inside, both Jeff and Joy are there. Jeff had taken the day off work, but Joy had told me that, having only just started at her new job, she wasn’t able to take a day off yet.

  “Surprise,” she says. “I made your favourite cake, Mum.” The house smells delicious.

  “Come here, darling.” Miranda tugs Joy towards her. “I still don’t think you should have seduced poor, defenceless Alice, but you’re the best daughter a mother could ask for.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “So, Alice,” Joy says the next Saturday afternoon. Jeff has taken Miranda on an impromptu trip to the Cotswolds to take her mind off the impending biopsy result. They’re due back on Sunday evening, which gives Joy and me some time for just the two of us.

  “Yes.” I look up from the book I’m reading. It’s the Lee Child book I never got to finish in Portugal.

  “Remember, before all hell broke loose last weekend, I told you I had something for you.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s right.” I had totally forgotten about that. “What do you have for me, Joy?”

  She sits there with a massive twinkle in her eyes. I have absolutely no idea what she could have got me, or what the occasion would be to give me a present.

  “Well, I brought it
with me. Let me just go and get it from my bag.” She rises. “Actually, I think you should come upstairs with me. I think it’s better if I show you in the bedroom.”

  A tingle sprouts in my stomach. What is she up to? “Okay.” I put down my book and look at her. She’s leaning against the chimney now, and the sparkle in her eyes has possibly got even bigger.

  “Come on.” She turns on her heel and dashes up the stairs.

  Brimming with curiosity, and somehow knowing it’s going to be a gift that will make me blush, I follow her. By the time I make it to the bedroom, she’s sitting on the bed with a wrapped rectangular box in her hands.

  “You know I love you, Alice. I’m actually completely besotted with you. And, I guess, now that Mum has given us her blessing, I would like to take things to the next level.”

  A quick wave of panic hits me. Is this one of those lesbian things I read about on the internet? About moving in after the second date, and proposing marriage after only a few months together? That doesn’t fit with the box she’s holding, though, nor does it gel, I think, with Joy’s personality. “Yes…” I say, hesitantly.

  “Well, here you go.” She hands me the package. Perhaps she wrapped the keys to her flat in an elaborate wooden box, although we’ve been spending more and more time at my house, because it’s closer to her mother, and, without any pomp or circumstance, I handed her a key to my front door a few days ago.

  I take the wrapped box from her and shake it about a bit. It’s very light. Then, curiosity gets the best of me, and I start tearing the paper off while trying to remember when someone gave me a present last. It was probably Miranda for my birthday last year. When all the wrapping paper has come off, I see a plastic box with, inside on full display, a… penis-shaped object in all the colours of the rainbow. I can’t help but stare at it in silence for long seconds. I’m not looking at Joy at all, but it’s as though I can sense her sitting there very pleased with herself for some reason.