Ghosted

by Rosie Walsh

  At Holland Park Avenue, I started running. For a short while I sailed effortlessly past bus stops sheltering tired-looking migrants on their way to work, cafés with grilles still down, an inebriated man stumbling back from Notting Hill. I tuned out the whine of night buses and taxis, allowing only the slap of my trainers and the warble of the dawn chorus.

  My effortless sailing didn’t last long. As the road began to climb toward Notting Hill, my lungs started to burst, as they always did, and my legs gave up. I walked up to the Portobello turnoff.

  There’s nothing crazy about what I’m doing, I thought, when I could force myself to run again. London is awake already. A workers’ café was packed out with tradesmen in hi-vis vests; a man was opening a coffee cart on Westbourne Grove. London was on the move. Why shouldn’t I be? This was fine.

  * * *

  • • •

  Only, of course, it was not, because my body felt tired and miserable, and I was the only runner I saw for the duration. And because it was still only 4:45 A.M. by the time I got back to Tommy’s.

  I showered and slid into bed. I tried for five minutes not to check my phone.

  One missed call, the screen advised, when I gave in. I sat up. It was a withheld number, at 4:19 A.M. A message had been left.

  The message comprised two seconds of silence, followed by the sound of a human pressing the wrong button. After a brief scrabble, the caller managed successfully to hang up.

  Briefly, I wondered if it was Eddie’s friend Alan, but according to Facebook he had not yet read my message.

  Then who?

  Eddie?

  No! Eddie’s not that person! He’s a talker! Not some shady crackpot who calls at 4 A.M.!

  * * *

  • • •

  By the time I woke at lunchtime, Alan had read my message. He had not replied.

  I stared at my phone dementedly, refreshing it again and again. He couldn’t just ignore it. Nobody would do that!

  But he had read it, and he had ignored it. The day passed; I heard nothing. And I felt frightened. Less, as each day passed, for Eddie, and more, as each day passed, for myself.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Rudi was absolutely still.

  He stood and stared at the two meerkats closest to the fence, and they stood and stared at him, paws resting casually on their soft bellies. Rudi, without realizing what he was doing, had straightened up and had rested his own little paws on his own little belly.

  “Hello,” he whispered reverently. “Hello, meerikats.”

  “Meerkats,” I corrected.

  “Sarah, be quiet! You might frighten them!”

  Tommy alerted Rudi to the arrival of another meerkat and Rudi whipped round, forgetting in an instant that I existed. “Hello, meerikat three,” he whispered. “Meerikats, hello! Are you a family? Or just best friends?”

  Two of the meerkats started burrowing in the sand. The third shuffled over his sandy hill to give what looked like a hug to another member of the tribe. Rudi almost trembled with wonder.

  Jo took a photo of her son. Five minutes ago she’d been telling Rudi off about something; now she smiled at him with a love that had no edges. And watching her, trying to imagine that sort of towering, immeasurable devotion, I felt it again. An acute poke from the lumpy cluster of feelings I kept in a remote corner. It was right that I wasn’t going to be a mother, of course, but the pain of lost possibility sometimes left me breathless.

  I extracted my sunglasses from my bag.

  My parents had found a carer for Granddad and would be back in Gloucestershire tomorrow. Rudi wanted a farewell tea at Battersea Park Children’s Zoo before I left to go and see them, although this, I suspected, had more to do with a recent television program he’d watched about meerkats than it did saying good-bye to Aunty Sarah.

  I checked my phone, a reflex as common now as breathing. After the dropped phone call I’d had in the middle of the night last week there’d been another one, a few days ago, and it had lasted a full fifteen seconds. “I’ll call the police,” I’d said, when whoever it was refused to say anything. The caller had hung up immediately and there hadn’t been anything since, but I was certain it had something to do with Eddie’s disappearance.

  I wasn’t sleeping very much at all now.

  Tommy unpacked the little tea he’d made and Rudi came running over to eat, recounting a poorly remembered joke about eggy sandwiches and eggy farts. Jo told him off for talking with his mouth full. A child nearby was whining about missing out on feeding the coati. And I sat in the middle of them all, unable to eat my sandwiches, a miserable churning in my stomach.

  Not long before leaving the sixth form, I’d studied Mrs. Dalloway for my English A level. We’d taken turns narrating the book, exploring Woolf’s “unique narrative technique,” as Mrs. Rushby called it.

  “The world has raised its whip,” I read aloud when my turn came; “where will it descend?”

  I had paused, surprised, and then read the sentence again. And even though my classmates were watching me, even though Mrs. Rushby was watching me, I had underlined the sentence three times before moving on, because those words had described so perfectly how I felt, most of the time, that I marveled that anyone other than me could have written them.

  The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?

  That was it! seventeen-year-old me had thought. That perpetual alertness! Watching the skies, sniffing the air, bracing for calamity. That’s me. And yet here I was now, nineteen years on, feeling exactly the same. Had anything actually changed? Had my comfortable life in California been mere fantasy?

  I had another look at my egg sandwich but it made me heave.

  “Oi,” Jo said, in my direction. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. I’m just enjoying my tea.”

  “Interesting,” said Jo, “given that you’re not actually eating it.”

  After a pause I apologized. Told them I knew I must seem insane. Told them I was trying so very, very hard to pull myself together, but that I wasn’t having much luck.

  “Did he break your heart?” Rudi asked. “The man?”

  Everyone stopped talking. Neither Jo nor Tommy could look at me. But Rudi did, Rudi with his little almond eyes and his perfect child’s understanding of the world.

  “Did he break your heart, Sarah?”

  “I . . . Well, yes,” I said, when I found my voice. “Yes, I’m afraid he did.”

  Rudi wheeled from side to side on his heels, watching me. “He’s a villain,” he said, after careful consideration. “And a fart.”

  “He is,” I agreed.

  Rudi gave me a hug, which brought me to the very edge of tears.

  Tommy was holding my phone, staring thoughtfully at Eddie’s Facebook page. “I do wonder about this man,” he said, after a long silence.

  “You and me both, Tommy.”

  “The WheresWally hashtag, for starters,” Tommy said. “Isn’t that a bit odd? His name’s Eddie.”

  Jo opened a packet of dried fruit and nuts for Rudi. “Eat them slow,” she told him, before turning to Tommy. “Where’s Wally? is a series of books, you plonker,” she said. “Don’t you remember? All them pictures of crowds with Wally hidden in them?”

  Rudi began picking out raisins and discarding the nuts.

  “I know what Where’s Wally? is,” Tommy said. “I just think it’s a strange thing to say about someone whose name is meant to be Eddie.”

  I shook my head. “That’s just what you say when you’re looking for someone. Scouring crowds. Needle-in-haystack job.”

  Tommy shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe he’s someone else entirely.”

  Rudi perked up. “Do you think Eddie is a murderer?” he asked.

  “No,” Tommy said.

  “A vampire?”

 
“No.”

  “A gas man?” Jo had recently explained Stranger Danger.

  Tommy stared thoughtfully at my phone. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “But there’s something fishy about this man.” Then suddenly he sat up straight. “Sarah!” he whispered. “Look!”

  I took the phone from him and found he’d opened up my Messenger. Then everything surged forward and into free fall, like water from a weir. Eddie was online. He had read my messages. Both of them. He was online now.

  He was not dead. He was somewhere. “What were you doing in my messages?” I hissed.

  “I was being nosy,” Tommy said. “I wanted to see what you’d been saying to him, but who cares? He’s read your messages! He’s online!”

  “What did he say?” Rudi was trying to grab the phone. “What did he say to you, Sarah?”

  Jo confiscated the phone and took a good long look.

  “I hate to tell you this,” she said, “but he read your messages three hours ago.”

  “Why hasn’t he written back?” Rudi asked.

  It was a good question.

  “I’m getting tired of your boyfriend, Sarah,” Rudi said. “I think he’s a really horrible person.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Let’s go down the meerkat tunnel,” Jo said.

  Rudi looked at me, and then at his precious meerkats, ten yards away—ten yards too far.

  “Go,” I told him. “Go and be with your people. I’m fine.”

  “Just walk away, Sarah,” Jo repeated, as her son scampered off. She sounded exhausted suddenly. “Life is too short to run around after someone who makes you miserable.”

  She went to join Rudi. Tommy and I stared at the screen. Impulsively, I typed, Hello?

  Seconds later, Eddie’s picture dropped down next to the message. “That means he’s read it,” Tommy said.

  I won’t bite, I wrote.

  Eddie read the message. And then—just like that—he went offline.

  I stood up. I had to see him. Talk to him. I had to do something. “Help,” I said. “What do I do, Tommy? What do I do?”

  After a beat, Tommy stood up and put his arm around my shoulders. If I closed my eyes, we could be back in 1997 at LAX, me crumpled against him in the arrivals hall, him carrying the keys for a huge, air-conditioned car, telling me everything would be okay.

  “Maybe his mum got really bad with her depression,” I said desperately. “He told me she was on a downward spiral when I met him. Maybe it got really scary.”

  “Maybe,” Tommy said quietly. “But, Harrington, if he was serious about you two, he’d still have sent a message. Explained. Asked you to give him a few weeks.”

  I didn’t argue, because I couldn’t.

  “See if he replies,” Tommy said, squeezing my shoulder. “But unless he does soon, and unless something really quite extraordinary has happened to him, I think you should consider very seriously whether or not you want to see him again. It’s not kind to have put you through this.”

  Awkwardly, but with much tenderness, he kissed the side of my head. “Maybe Jo’s right,” he said. “Maybe you do need to let go.”

  My oldest friend had his arm around my shoulder. The man who’d helped me glue myself back together, all those years ago, who’d watched me lose everything and somehow rebuild my life. And now we were only a few short years from forty, and it was happening again.

  “She is right,” I said dully. “You both are. I have to let go.”

  And I meant it. The only problem was, I didn’t know how.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  This is not just a broken heart, I thought, later that night. I was standing in Tommy and Zoe’s kitchen in my pajamas, eating crisps. It’s more than that.

  But what?

  The accident? Is it something to do with the accident?

  There were so many blanks in my memory of that awful day. Distance, or trauma, or perhaps the vast difference between my English and American lives had helped me block out a lot of what happened. And yet the feelings I was having now, I knew them. They were like bad old friends.

  At 1:30 A.M. I decided to use this surfeit of energy to attempt some work. My colleagues had been too polite to say anything, but I knew I’d have someone on the phone if I didn’t process the backlog soon.

  I got back into bed and opened my e-mails. And my brain—finally—ignited. I made big decisions; I made small decisions. I authorized spends and sent a report to our trustees. I checked our Web mail folder, because nobody ever remembered to check it, and found an e-mail from a little girl asking if some of our clowns could visit her twin sister, who was very sick in a hospital in San Diego. Of course! I wrote, forwarding the e-mail to Reuben and Kate, my deputy. Send in the clowns! It’s a hospital we know! Let’s have our guys in there by Friday, please, team!

  By three in the morning I realized that my brain was running at a speed I didn’t like.

  By four I felt quite mad.

  At a quarter past four I decided to call Jenni. Jenni Carmichael would know what to do.

  “Sarah Mackey!” she said. I could hear the soaring violins of an old romantic film in the background. “What the hell are you doing awake at this time of night?”

  Thank you, I thought, closing my eyes. Thank you, God, for my dear Jenni Carmichael.

  My wedding to Reuben had been something of an embarrassment. His side of the congregation was full, whereas mine contained only Mum, Dad, Tommy, Jo, and a couple of waitresses from the café on Fountain where Reuben and I had held our first charity meetings. No Hannah. Just a silent space on the bench next to Mum. And no friends either, because nobody in England knew what to say to me anymore, let alone wanted to fly across the world for the pleasure of still not knowing what to say.

  I’d told Reuben’s family that “none of my English friends could make it” and shame had sloshed all over me like beer from an overfull glass.

  Reuben and I had a beautiful honeymoon in Yosemite. Hidden away in a bell jar of love, we were happy. But when toward the end of the trip we found ourselves in San Francisco, surrounded by laughing groups of young people, my friendlessness had taunted me again.

  Then Jenni had arrived in my life, as if shipped in by courier. Jenni was from South Carolina. She had no interest in the film industry, unlike most out-of-towners: she just “wanted to try something new.” While Reuben and I were wandering around northern California as newlyweds, Jenni was being installed as the manager of the office building where Reuben and I rented a desk, a gray concrete block crouching in the shadow of the Hollywood Freeway.

  Upon our return, she had come to ask me if we were planning to pay our overdue desk rental anytime soon. I handed over cash and apologies the very same day, hovering guiltily beside her as she counted the dollar bills. On her desk I noted half a cake wrapped in cling film and a small CD player on which she was playing what sounded like a “Greatest Love Songs” compilation. She glanced up at me and smiled as she thumbed through the money with a rubber thimble. “I suck at numbers,” she said. “I’m counting the bills to look efficient.” She went back to the beginning of the pile twice before giving up.

  “I’ll trust you,” she said, putting the money in a cash box. “You look honest. Would you like some cake? I baked it last night. I’m scared I’m going to eat the whole damned thing.”

  The cake was outstanding, and, as I ate it by her desk, Jenni recounted her interview with the very strange man who owned the building. She did a near-perfect impression of him. I want her to be my friend, I thought, as she skipped a modern power ballad in favor of Barbra Streisand. She was nothing like me, or anyone I’d ever known, and I liked her all the more for it.

  I’d have got there. I’d have found friends eventually. I still carried the scars of my past but was emerging already as Sarah Mackey, charity executive: pleasant, ul
trareliable, sometimes witty. But Jenni Carmichael was the conduit; through her I began to meet people, to believe that I could belong here in this city I so needed to call home.

  Three years later Jenni had become not only a firm friend but a valuable asset to our charity. When Reuben and I signed a long lease on a building on Vermont, just two blocks down from the Children’s Hospital, she quit her job and came with us. Our new HQ wasn’t much to look at, surrounded by dicey-looking medical clinics, coin laundries, and takeaways, but the rent was low, and it had a big, open ground floor that would become Reuben’s training academy for new Clowndoctors. She came first as our office manager, then as “someone who helped with grants,” until eventually, after several years, we made her our VP of fund-raising.

  A year or so after we met, she had forged her own perfect love story and now lived happily on the edge of Westlake and Historic Filipinotown with a man called Javier, who fixed wealthy folks’ SUVs and bought her flowers every week. She lived for their romantic getaways and talked about Javier as if he were God Himself.

  They had been trying for a baby for eleven years. She refused to complain, because complaining was not something she had much time for, but it was killing her. Slowly, and from the inside, it was destroying my friend. For her I had even prayed to a god I’d never believed in. Please give her a baby. It’s all she wants.

  If this final round of IVF didn’t work out, I had no idea what she’d do. Neither she nor Javier had the money to fund treatment once her insurers had stopped paying out. “Last-chance saloon!” she’d said stoutly, when we hugged good-bye at LAX.

  Jenni had been shocked by my break with Reuben. I think it shattered her assumptions about love: sure, people divorced all the time, but not those in her immediate life. She got around it by taking on the role of rescuer, for which she’d been designed. She downloaded apps to my phone, moved me into her spare room, and made a vast number of cakes.