The Memories That Make Us

by Vanessa Carnevale

  Scarlett’s doctor steps in between us all, breaking the silence, and I can’t do anything but turn around and head for the door to escape.

  Outside the hospital, I wave down another cab, and give him the apartment address. By now it’s already mid-morning, and I’m praying Blake isn’t at work.

  The streets are moderately trafficked and the cab driver, clearly impatient, begins to accelerate at any chance he can get, before braking suddenly when he comes closer to the car in front. I clasp my seatbelt tighter to stop the jolting. At the next set of lights, he speeds up again, and I want to tell him to be careful, to slow down, and the instant he slams on the brakes again, and the screech pierces my ears, I regret staying quiet. We’ve hit something.

  I open the door and stumble out of the car.

  ‘How could you?’ I say, crouching down in the middle of the road, the limp body of a small terrier lying on the asphalt. She whimpers in pain, her eyes drifting open and closed as her limp body barely moves, aside from the gentle rise and fall of her chest. Car horns toot as the traffic weaves in and around us. The driver has a desperate look on his face. ‘How could you be so careless?!’ I scoop the dog into my arms and place her in the back seat of the cab.

  ‘What are you doing, lady?’ he says, standing there, looking horrified.

  ‘You’re taking me to the closest animal hospital before this poor dog dies,’ I demand through gritted teeth.

  I can tell he wants to argue with me, but I slam the door closed and fasten my seatbelt before lifting the dog onto my lap. ‘You’ll be fine,’ I whisper, stroking her honey-coloured fur. ‘What’s your name?’ I ask, checking her collar. ‘Dottie,’ I say, reading her name tag. A few minutes later we’ve reached the nearest vet clinic. The cab driver hauls out my suitcase, and I glare at him before awkwardly dragging the case inside, while carrying Dottie against my chest.

  A vet nurse greets me at reception. ‘She’s been hit by a car and I don’t think she’s in very good shape.’ She nods and takes a clipboard. ‘She’s not mine,’ I say, feeling her weight in my arms. She’s beginning to feel more limp by the minute. She’s now closed her eyes. ‘We’ve only got one vet working today’s shift, but I’ll call him out right away and we’ll take a look.’ She takes Dottie from my arms and carries her into one of the rooms. ‘You’re welcome to stay to see how she is, or you can call to check on her later. Would you mind leaving your details so we know where to contact you if we have any questions about what happened?’

  I accept a piece of paper from her. ‘Sure,’ I say, taking a pen. I fill out my details and her attention turns to the person waiting behind me. Unsure whether to stay or go, I opt to stay. I huddle in a corner, beside a woman with her cat, while the sterile scent of antiseptic filters through the air. The nurse eventually calls the woman with the cat into a room, telling her the vet is almost ready to see her. I check the time. I’ve been here for almost an hour.

  Deciding I should go and make a phone call to the hospital to check on Scarlett, I rise from my chair and head for the door. ‘Here’s our number so you can check on her later,’ says the nurse, handing me a business card.

  ‘Thanks,’ I reply, accepting it from her. I head for the door, glancing down briefly at the card, when the vet calls out. ‘Let her know that Dottie’s going to be okay.’

  There’s a familiarity in his voice that I can’t quite pin. My eyes read over the card in my hands.

  Dr Blake Beaumont.

  Windsor Veterinary Hospital.

  I freeze, my heart thumping against my chest as if it’s trying to leap out.

  ‘Oh my God. Gracie?’ says a male voice from behind me.

  I slowly turn around to face him.

  ‘Flynn?’ I say, feeling confused. He and Flynn are colleagues? This is what he was hiding from me?

  I feel the colour drain from my face. I look around, conscious that Blake might emerge from one of the surgery doors at any moment.

  Flynn shakes his head and steps towards me, the rubber soles of his shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor.

  My eyes travel to his name badge.

  Blake.

  I rush out of the clinic door, and start gasping for air in the middle of the street.

  ‘Say something. Say anything,’ pleads Flynn, who has followed me outside. His face is smothered with an unbearable look of desperation. I can’t seem to let out any words. Craning my neck, I try to spot a cab.

  ‘Gracie,’ he repeats, more firmly this time. ‘Please. Look at me. Give me a chance to explain.’ He reaches for my hand, but I shake him away. My entire body is trembling with anger.

  ‘How could you?’ I say, hot tears pricking my eyes. I’m frantically trying to hold myself together, but the moment Flynn bites his lip, a frown forming on his brow, tears forming in his eyes, his heart breaking right before me, I lose it.

  ‘I can’t believe you did this,’ I croak, my voice fracturing with the realisation that Blake and Flynn are one and the same man. I shake my head and look up at the sky, trying to draw strength from above, trying to convince myself that this isn’t true. It can’t possibly be true. Can it?

  The chestnuts being knocked from my hand at Charlie’s stand.

  Our morning jogs.

  The Wild Wombat. The bridge in the Central Springs Reserve. Portobello’s. All places that seemed familiar because they were familiar, because I’ve no doubt been to these places with Flynn—no, Blake—before.

  ‘I wanted to tell you. I wanted to find the right time to tell you.’ Flynn shakes his head, his eyes damp and full of sorrow.

  The sinking feeling becomes heavier, weighted with the joyful memories of the past few months at Summerhill. Precious moments that slip through my mind like a movie being played over, and over, and over again.

  Losing someone hurts like hell, doesn’t it?

  God, he was talking about me, about how he felt when he lost me.

  A cab makes its way down the road towards us and I step onto the kerb to wave it down.

  ‘Wait, where are you going?’ says Flynn.

  I ignore him, fling open the cab door, take a seat, slam the door closed, and look straight ahead. ‘You had a chance to tell me—so many chances to tell me, and you didn’t! I think it’s a bit too late now, don’t you?’

  ‘No!’ he calls. He bangs his palm against the driver’s window and tells him to wait, before running in front of the cab and opening the other passenger door. He slips into the seat beside me and closes the door.

  ‘Gracie,’ he pleads, catching his breath.

  I scrunch my eyes closed. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear what he has to say. All I can think of is the fact that he lied to me.

  ‘Where to?’ the cab driver asks stiffly, glancing in the rearview mirror as he pulls out into the traffic. Whether I like it or not, wherever we’re going, Flynn is coming with me. He glances nervously at me, before reeling off an address. The address to our apartment. The place we once called home.

  I turn my body away from him and rest my face against the glass. And as the droplets from a fresh shower of Melbourne rain trickle down the window, tears of hurt and betrayal and disappointment slide down my face.

  We arrive outside the white stucco building after twelve minutes of excruciating silence, aside from my intermittent sniffling. I’ve managed to use every single tissue in my possession. I blow my nose, stuff the large wad of scrunched tissues down my bra and search my bag for my wallet to pay the taxi driver. Flynn beats me to it, digging into his pocket and producing a fifty-dollar note. The driver fishes for some change, Flynn tells him to keep it, before exiting the car and opening my door.

  I cross my arms, still unable to look at him. I reach for the door to try to close it, but he holds it open. I exit the cab, tugging my suitcase out from the back seat. Flynn takes it from me and I follow him inside, the echo of our footsteps making me wonder how many times we might have entered and exited this building, hand in hand, arm in arm. F
lynn slides a key into the lock and holds the door open for me. His jaw is clenched, his brow creased. He appears so uncomfortable, that as angry and hurt as I am, something in me aches for him and what he’s been through in all of this. To him, I’m his fiancée—the fiancée that he lost the day he lost control of a steering wheel on a drive that turned our lives completely upside down and destroyed everything.

  The photo frames on the side table that I turned down after arriving home from the hospital with Scarlett have been turned the right way up. I slowly step down the hallway, pausing to check the photos, to make sure this is actually true. My fingers sweep over the glass, over pictures of us frozen in time—moments I don’t remember. Like the time we sat in this particular tree, went to this particular restaurant, or sailed on that particular boat, or spent time in that particular … field of peonies. My hand covers my mouth as I pick up another frame containing a collage of photos of Flynn and I in Summerhill. The two of us kissing under the willow tree, holding up a sign saying, WE’RE GETTING HITCHED!, the two of us standing in the peony field, Flynn’s arms around my waist as I throw my head back in laughter, the two of us riding Polly. It’s all so unfathomable. Finally, I run my fingers over the black-and-white photo of the two of us, the one I saw after my return from hospital. Flynn’s hair looks different now—it’s longer, the natural waves in his hair more apparent, his jawline is more defined and he’s hardly ever clean-shaven like he is in this photo.

  ‘I thought you had dark hair,’ I whisper. ‘It was short. I thought …’ I shake my head. Flynn looks completely different to the impression I had of him from this photo. ‘My God, I don’t know what I thought.’

  Flynn stands next to me, patiently waiting as I take it all in. When I finally look up at him, he swallows hard. ‘It’s a really old photo. We were a lot younger then.’

  I nod silently and rest the frame back down.

  ‘Come,’ he says, nodding to the living room. ‘Drink?’ he asks, waiting for me to sit down. I wedge myself into the corner of the sofa and place a pillow on my lap, which I hug tightly. ‘No, thanks,’ I reply, sounding as morose as I feel.

  Flynn steps into the kitchen anyway, and comes out with a glass of water. He places it on the coffee table, on top of a copy of Country Dwellings.

  He sits beside me and clears his throat. ‘I never meant to hurt you like this. Hurting you is the last thing I wanted to do. I’m sorry. Really sorry. You have no idea how sorry. I just … didn’t know how else to …’

  ‘Manipulate me?’ I reply hotly.

  He cringes. ‘I knew that if I let you go—if you left and never came back, I might have lost you forever.’

  ‘You couldn’t have possibly known that,’ I fire at him.

  ‘You’re the most stubborn woman I know. If Scarlett couldn’t convince you to stay, then who could?’

  ‘So, instead of turning up at Summerhill and introducing yourself you thought that pretending to be a stranger was the better option?’

  ‘You and I both know what would have happened if I had turned up at Summerhill to see you.’

  ‘No we don’t actually. Because it never happened.’

  Flynn runs his hand through his hair.

  ‘Why didn’t Scarlett tell me? She’s supposed to be my best friend.’

  ‘I begged her not to. I told her I’d tell you when the timing was right.’

  ‘Well, your timing is bloody awful,’ I say through gritted teeth.

  He clenches his jaw as his eyes momentarily close.

  ‘She knew all along?’ I ask, trying to think back to the way she reacted when she saw Flynn in Summerhill.

  ‘No,’ he says. He takes a deep breath. ‘I didn’t tell her or Noah that I went to Summerhill. And when she did find out—when she saw me there—I made her promise not to say anything to you. Don’t blame her, Gracie, I put her in a terrible situation.’

  ‘You didn’t have the right to do that. When were you planning on telling me? You kept this whole thing a secret. You kept it from Scarlett and then you made her keep it, too. What were you thinking?’

  Flynn rubs his temples but doesn’t answer.

  ‘You took advantage of me when I was at my most vulnerable, Flynn! Who does that?!’

  ‘I didn’t know what else to do,’ he says flatly.

  I stand up and make my way down the hallway.

  Flynn follows me.

  ‘Gracie, please … you need to understand why I did this. I never gave up on you. I never gave up on us. You—’

  ‘Don’t you dare!’ I yell. ‘It’s not like I made a conscious decision to forget you!’

  ‘You never even gave me a chance to see you. You left that hospital and you walked out of there and into another life, a life that didn’t include me! What was I supposed to do? Just let you go?’

  ‘Yes, Flynn, you were supposed to let me go, so that I could work things out!’

  ‘So you could potentially fall in love with someone else? And lose you completely?’

  I feel like I’ve been slapped. I take a step backwards. ‘That’s not fair. You manipulated me. You barged straight into my life and …’

  ‘And?’

  … you made me fall in love with you.

  ‘I loved you. I trusted you,’ I whisper.

  ‘And I’d do it again, a thousand times over if it meant I could live another day of my life with you in it.’

  ‘You had no right. You had no right to do this.’

  ‘You once told me that you never wanted to live your life without me in it—no matter what. And I know you don’t remember that, but every single day I wake up wishing that you would. So that you’d know what we had, and what we lost.’

  ‘Stop.’ I place my hands around my ears.

  ‘No. I’m not done yet! I’m not done until I finish telling you how much I love you. Because you have no idea what I lost, the minute the paramedics put you onto that stretcher and wheeled you away. You don’t know what it was like for me to walk into this apartment and not find you here. And you sure as hell have no idea what it’s been like for me to lie to the most important person in my life, when I spend almost every minute of every day wanting to tell you the truth but I hold back because I never wanted this day to come. Because whatever is happening now, is everything I was afraid would happen. In all of this, I never wanted to lose you, but I figured losing you, knowing I’d tried to at least salvage what we had, was the better option.’

  Flynn lets out a long breath and wipes his eyes with his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘I loved you so much,’ he whispers. ‘And I have no idea if you’ll get past this, but for what it’s worth—I love who you are now even more than I ever did before.’

  I can’t respond to that right now, so I bite my lip and turn away, opening the front door, the breeze sending a chill through my body.

  ‘You don’t have to go,’ he says, but we both know I can’t stay.

  I turn around before stepping out the door.

  ‘Flynn. Is that a name you just made up?’

  ‘Blake Flynn Beaumont,’ he replies flatly.

  ‘I think I prefer Flynn.’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I spend the night in a hotel overlooking the Yarra River, watching the digits of the alarm clock flip over and over until the early hours of the morning, while the last few months of my life play over in my mind. If Flynn—Blake— hadn’t come to Summerhill, would I have potentially fallen in love with another man? Would I have come back to Melbourne and slowly allowed Flynn back into my life? Would I have fallen in love with him again with the expectation that I should love him hovering over me like a heavy cloud? I don’t think I would have. But how can I be sure? I can’t possibly be. And that’s the thing that weighs on my mind the most—that there’s no way of truly knowing. Yet, Flynn, through the very act of hiding who he really was, showed me that maybe, somehow, we do end up with who we’re meant to end up with. It doesn’t change the fact that he lied to me, and that’s s
omething I don’t know if I’ll be able to forgive. I have no way of knowing if he lied to me before.

  I shower and dress and catch a cab to the hospital to see Scarlett. She smiles when she sees me, but her eyes are filled with worry.

  ‘Everything okay with the baby?’ I ask, sitting beside her on the bed. ‘May I?’ I hold my hand above her belly.

  Smiling, she nods. ‘Of course. The baby is doing okay. They’re inducing me in an hour.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘They say the baby should be fine.’

  I smile with relief. I’m happy for Scarlett.

  ‘Noah said you spoke to Blake.’

  The joy dissipates, like a leaf dropping from a flower that has little life force left in it.

  ‘Flynn,’ I say, correcting her.

  She shakes her head. ‘Sorry, yes, well, this is going to be a bit awkward.’ She pokes her finger through the hole in her thermal blanket. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth. I didn’t know what to do, to be honest. Which is another reason I didn’t call as often as I wanted to. It was all too hard.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be my best friend,’ I whisper. ‘I wish you had told me.’

  The colour drains from Scarlett’s face. ‘He begged me not to tell you and I begged him to tell you. He just …’ She shrugs and looks at me with earnest eyes. ‘He desperately wanted a second chance.’

  ‘Well, he lost it.’

  Scarlett’s shoulders sag. ‘You’re angry. Hurt and angry. Which you have every right to be. Even with me.’

  ‘I can’t be mad with you, Scarlett, you’re about to make me a godmother.’

  She offers a half-smile, moving her hand onto her belly. ‘Well, I hope the godmother can sort things out with the godfather,’ she says. ‘Although, technically you’re almost an aunty.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me about Noah, either.’

  ‘I tried to tell you so many things before you left for Summerhill. You were so adamant you didn’t want to know anything.’

  She’s right. I can’t argue with this. It was something I fought so hard for.

  ‘Have you remembered anything about any of us?’ she asks.