Sophie's Run

by Wells, Nicky

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so, so sorry. I know they all think I’m going to do myself in, but I’m not. I lost it. I’m sorry.”

  I hesitated. Was this the right time to talk?

  “Do you want to tell me what happened?” I asked, as gently as I could. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to, I don’t want to be nosey or anything… Just if you want to…”

  “He dumped me,” Rachel cut into my clumsy ramblings.

  I stared, uncomprehending.

  “He dumped you?” I repeated before I could think better of it. It was too big a fact to take in.

  “He did,” Rachel confirmed. “He didn’t even warn me. He simply turned up with somebody else. The bastard. The evil….”

  “Hold it, hold it, backtrack a little for me here,” I pleaded. “What was this thing on the boat anyway?”

  “I don’t really know, some posh function. A launch party, I think. Well, it had a launch all right,” she suddenly snorted. “Just not the kind they’d expected.”

  Humor. That was a good sign, surely?

  “Right, so you turned up at this party on your own?” I verified.

  Rachel nodded. “I didn’t really want to go, it’s not my scene. I didn’t know anybody there. We’ve had some friction over that lately. Anyway…” she trailed off.

  “You went, and he met you there?” I offered.

  “I went, and he didn’t meet me there. He brought somebody else. He didn’t even acknowledge me.”

  I must have looked like a question mark, because she reiterated. “He pretended he didn’t know me. He blanked me. I tried to talk to him but he had security take me away.”

  I gave a sharp intake of breath. Oh my God.

  I was going to find him. And when I had found him, I was going to kill him. No, better still, I was going to tear him apart alive, bit by bit.

  But Rachel was still talking.

  “So I flipped. I went to the railing and took my ring off and threw that over the side. I thought I’d feel better, but I didn’t. And then it seemed like a really good idea to go after it. I mean, what’s the point of it all?” She shrugged her shoulders. “I hadn’t even drunk anything. I threw my glass of champagne at him before they dragged me away. What a waste, huh?” She gave a hysterical giggle. “Anyway. What a stupid thing to do. I felt I couldn’t go on. But you can always go on. Of course you can. Remember Gloria Gaynor, right?” And unbelievably, she burst into song. Very softly. “I’ve got all my life to live, I’ve got all my love to give, I will survive… I will survive…”

  Her eyes glazed over and she bore a crazed expression. A rash of goosebumps spread from my arms to the nape of my neck. I hated seeing my friend like this, veering between her calm, rational self and hysterical, defiant self-pity. Yet before I could say anything to comfort her, she passed out. A nurse—a different one from before—gave a little cough. She seemed to have been in the room for a while.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I had to be here. I didn’t mean to listen. Anyway, looks like she’s asleep now. That’ll be the sedative kicking in.”

  I nodded. “Was this…was this really her talking, or was that the sedative, too?”

  The nurse smiled. “A bit of both. What a shock, though. You can kind of understand her reaction, can’t you?” She busied herself straightening Rachel’s blankets.

  “You’d better go and get some rest,” she suggested. “Come back in the morning. She’ll have a jolly good sleep. Everything will be better in the morning.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  When I emerged from the hospital, more shaken than I had realized, I found Dan waiting outside the lobby. He looked slightly disheveled and very pale.

  “What on earth happened?” he greeted me. “Is Rachel all right?”

  I started talking, but he interrupted me immediately. “You look done in, let’s get you home. You can tell me on the way.” He took my arm and led me toward the car park. I filled him in on the evening’s events on the drive home, and his face assumed a grim, and a grimmer still expression.

  “Low,” he mumbled under his breath. “That’s really low.” He drove on in silence, but at the next red traffic light he suddenly erupted. “Bastard,” he announced forcefully and smacked the steering wheel as hard as he could.

  “I know,” I concurred. “Bastard. Scum. Evil son of a bitch. I’ve gone through the whole catalogue but nothing’s quite strong enough.”

  Another silence ensued as we neared Dan’s house. Soon, we were sitting in Dan’s kitchen, me with a gin and tonic—for medicinal reasons—and Dan with a whisky on the rocks.

  “You don’t think…” Dan pondered, sounding hesitant to express his thoughts. “Well, is it possible that Jordan might have tried to break up with her for a while and she didn’t get it?” he finally ventured.

  I spluttered into my drink.

  “No!” I issued with considerable emphasis. “How can you even think that? They were engaged.” I took a deep breath to steady my voice. “Rachel picks up on these things, she would have known something was wrong. No,” I reiterated, “this was a complete surprise to her.”

  “I guess you’re right.” Dan was crestfallen. “I never really liked the guy that much but I find it hard to believe that he could be so cruel.”

  “I liked him,” I confessed. “They seemed so good together. But this…well, this is something else.”

  “Oughtn’t we to find out why?” Dan ventured once more.

  “No. Absolutely not. I don’t care about his side of the story.” I banged my glass on the table for emphasis this time, noting absentmindedly that it appeared to be empty. “What he did was inexcusable. Unforgivable. No matter what the reason, you don’t do that to a person.” And, as a classic non-sequitur, “Can I have another, please?” I waved my glass in the air.

  “Sure,” Dan jumped up and busied himself with the ice cube maker.

  “I guess you’re right,” he said again as he sat down once more. “I just don’t know what else to say.”

  “There’s nothing to say,” I pondered. “He dumped her, and she threw herself off a boat. Now she’s in the hospital, and they think she’s at risk of inflicting more harm on herself. That’ll look really good on her health records. That’ll stay with her all her life.”

  “Okay, okay,” Dan soothed as I was getting myself worked up again. “Calm down. It’s done now. And she didn’t have to jump, nobody made her.”

  I snorted again. “Only a man could say that. Of course she didn’t have to bloody jump. Of course nobody made her. That’s exactly the point. She flipped. She lost it. Temporary outage, if you will. She will regret this bitterly in the morning. She’ll feel really stupid. But she felt she had no way out. Have you never felt that way, ever?” I challenged him.

  Dan considered this. “Nah, not really. But!” Something occurred to him. “When Irene left me…”

  He paused while I waited with bated breath for what he would say next. Even though that was way before my time, I knew he had been heartbroken after the divorce.

  Smiling ruefully, he continued, “When she’d gone, after I’d been all patient and calm… Well, when I was on my own, I guess I lost it a bit.” He stopped and turned red.

  “What did you do?” I pounced, intrigued.

  “I…” he faltered.

  “Go on, you’ve got to tell me now.”

  “I smashed up my Les Paul.”

  I sucked in my breath. “Your Les Paul? Your Black Beauty? Your beloved electric guitar?” I confirmed, incredulous. “The really, really expensive one?”

  “Yup, my baby. I smashed it against the wall. I don’t know what came over me.” He looked sheepish all over again.

  “See,” I pounced. “You do get it. You destroyed something really precious to you. That’s not a million miles away from throwing yourself into the river on an impulse. It’s certainly the same range of emotion.”

  “Okay, all right, I get it,” Dan conceded, not quit
e convinced. “Anyway,” he drew circles on the table top in the condensation puddles that had run off our glasses. “What now? Where does Rachel go from here?”

  “I don’t know,” I sighed. “First of all, we’ve got to get her out of hospital as soon as possible.”

  Dan walked in through his front door carrying a hold-all when I stumbled bleary-eyed down the stairs the next morning.

  “Morning,” he greeted me cheerfully, looking gleeful and excited.

  “Morning,” I greeted him back. “Where have you been?”

  “I,” Dan announced, clearly bursting to share his story, “tracked down the elusive Jordan and I collected all of Rachel’s things from his flat.”

  “You what?” It was too much to take in so early, and I allowed myself to sit down on the bottom step while I digested the information.

  It turned out that after I had gone to bed, Dan had driven round to Jordan’s flat and waited. Waited, until a very drunk Jordan finally rolled in in the wee small hours of the morning in the company of the very same long-legged blonde bimbo whose appearance had driven Rachel to her desperate deed.

  “I can tell you,” he said, joining me on the bottom step, “I nearly lost the plot. I was so bloody angry when the two of them rolled up together, totally unaware of the misery they had caused.” His brow creased with cross lines as he recalled his emotions.

  I had never seen him seriously angry, but I could imagine that that would be a frightful sight.

  “But then I remembered that that’s not my style, really,” he carried on, “so I came up with something else instead. I sent the blonde bimbo packing and told her to have herself checked over at her local STD clinic, just in case she’d picked up something nasty.”

  “You didn’t,” I breathed. “That’s slander.”

  “I sure did, and I don’t care if it’s slander,” he retorted cheerfully.

  Having dispatched the offending female, he made Jordan admit him to his flat and confronted him.

  “What the fuck are you playing at,” he had yelled. “You were planning a wedding with Rachel and you dump her for a slut?”

  Jordan, or so Dan said, had been quite taken aback by this turn of events. “I… I…” he had started, unable to string together a sentence.

  “Too dumb, or too drunk,” I snorted, feeling vicious.

  “Precisely,” Dan concurred. “Anyway, I pressed him and I pressed him and do you know what he said?”

  I shook my head, uncertain whether I wanted to hear. Dan didn’t give me a choice. He was on a roll.

  “He said,” he hollered, swept away by remembered anger, “he said he was bored. He said Rachel was suffocating him with all that wedding stuff and he just wanted to have some fun. Some fun!” Dan was furious even as he retold the conversation.

  “I’ve done some pretty stupid stuff in my time, you know I’m not a saint,” he reflected on his own misdemeanors. “But what Jordan did on that boat, the way he treated Rachel so callously, so very carelessly, that was in a league of its own. That was contemptible.” He thumped the stairs with his fist to vent his feelings.

  “Anyway, without another word, I collected every last little scrap of Rachel’s belongings that I could find, plus the keys to her flat. Jordan collapsed on the sofa in a blubbering heap while I put her stuff into my bag.”

  He lifted the hold-all for emphasis. “He was crying like a baby, and it made me even more cross. I said to him, ‘Save the drama, mate, you’re too late, what you did was inexcusable.’ And then I just left him there.”

  Dan, the avenging angel. I felt a warm glow of hero worship and affection, and if I hadn’t been quite so determinedly over this guy, I might have fallen in love all over again. I gave him a big hug, just for good measure.

  After a quick breakfast, Dan drove me to Rachel’s flat so I could get some of her clothes and toiletries before visiting her back in the hospital.

  When I got to the ward, Rachel was finishing her breakfast. She still looked very pale, but her eyes were alive and her demeanor was animated. The cannula had gone and there was little evidence of medical attention still being given. I pulled the curtain round her bed to give us some privacy from the other five ward-mates and we got talking. Rachel launched straight in.

  “I’m so sorry to have given you such a fright,” she said, grabbing my hand and making me sit with her on the bed. “I don’t know what came over me.” She shrugged. “Well, I do actually, but it all seems so silly now.”

  I nodded, not knowing what to say.

  “It’s just…I was so hurt. Can you understand that?” She looked at me with pleading eyes. I nodded again.

  “And I’d thrown the ring overboard, which you have to admit is quite a reasonable response, and it looked so pretty as it glittered and fell…and it was gone, and I thought, wow, I bet it’s nice and peaceful down there…and suddenly, I don’t know. The water looked so…inviting.”

  I inclined my head to indicate that I had listened and motioned for her to go on.

  “And then I was in it. In the river. It was cold. And quiet. I couldn’t hear any noise from the boat anymore, only the water whooshing past and my breathing in my ears. And I was so tired.” She trailed off and shrugged. “It all seemed so easy. Just to let go. No more worries. Just…flowing.”

  “Is that why you turned away from the lifeboat?” I had to know. Of all the events I had witnessed, that was probably what had disturbed me most.

  “I didn’t know it was a lifeboat. I couldn’t see properly. I thought it was Jordan coming to taunt me,” she explained.

  I digested this. Okay, I could accept that. It sounded within the realm of the plausible.

  “But didn’t they call to you?”

  “They might have done, but it is really hard to hear in the water. And the engines were making a lot of noise. And frankly, I didn’t care. I just wanted to get away.”

  That sentence hung between us for a while.

  “But why?” I eventually persisted, holding up a hand to stave off a quick response. “I know what Jordan did, and it’s truly despicable.” I took her hands and made her look at me. “But Rach, you’ve got so much going for you. Your friends, me, your job, your lovely flat… You can’t have wanted to throw all that away just because Jordan did something truly evil?”

  She looked at me levelly.

  “I simply couldn’t face picking up the pieces of my life all over again,” she finally offered. “I’d done it once before, and it took me years to put the light back into my life, and I didn’t think I had the energy to do it again.”

  This was news to me. “What are you talking about?” I asked, gingerly.

  Rachel sniffed. “My own thunderbolt-and-lightning man, and what happened with him,” she elaborated. “I never told you this before because it was too painful…but… Well, maybe it’s time I did.”

  “Okay,” I coaxed, “go on.”

  “What, here? Now?”

  “No time like the present. Go on, out with it,” I ordered.

  “Okay. I guess you’re right,” she said, but a nurse interrupted us, using that awful over-cheerful voice that set my teeth on edge every time.

  “Good morning, Rachel,” she trilled, “and how are we feeling this morning?”

  Rachel rolled her eyes at me.

  “I am feeling much better,” she retorted.

  “Jolly good,” the nurse continued, unperturbed. “I can see that we’re feeling better. We must have a little chat with another nurse before we can go home later today, and our mum and dad will be picking us up, I think. So”—she whisked Rachel’s covers off briskly—“we might need to go for a shower to make ourselves a bit more presentable.”

  Rachel snorted but obediently sat up. I proffered the bag of toiletries.

  “Here, knock yourself out,” I suggested and gave a big start as the nurse snatched the bag right out of my hand.

  “What’s in there?” she demanded, sounding terribly officious and rummaging t
hrough the bag. “These are only soaps and creams.”

  “Yes,” I explained sweetly, “they’re her favorites, that’s why I brought them. I meant ‘knock yourself out’ in the sense of ‘make yourself happy,’ you see?”

  The nurse handed the bag to Rachel and glared at me. Then she harrumphed her way down the ward. Rachel rolled her eyes at me in a sympathetic manner.

  “You’ve been told,” she snorted. “Naughty girl. Right, I’ll be off to make myself look human. Don’t go anywhere.” With that, she swung her legs off the bed and trotted off to explore the hospital showers.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When Rachel got out of the shower, she made the bed, rolling pillows and covers together to make a sofa-like shape, and we settled down for a chat.

  “His name was Alex,” Rachel launched in abruptly.

  Just as abruptly, the curtain was opened and a short, rosy-looking nurse popped her head through the gap. “Rachel?” she asked.

  Rachel raised her hand like a child in school. “That would be me.”

  The nurse stepped into the curtained area. “I’m Rosie. I am the mental health nurse on duty. I’m hoping that you’ll have a chat with me about what happened yesterday.”

  Rachel held the nurse’s gaze and answered evenly. “Of course.” The nurse cast a quick glance my way before continuing. “Based on our conversation, I will be able to assess whether we can discharge you today.”

  Rachel nodded. “Okay.” Inwardly, I applauded loudly; she was doing so great being composed and reasonable.

  The nurse stepped back and held the curtain open like a door. “Shall we go somewhere private?”

  “Of course, yes, that would be good,” Rachel acquiesced, swinging herself off the bed yet again. I watched her walk down the corridor with Rosie and prayed for the best.

  Half an hour later, she returned, looking a little drained but calm.