At First Sight

by Hannah Sunderland

  Chapter Thirty

  I wish I could say that I flourished in the weeks following Charlie’s return to Ireland. That I discovered that I didn’t miss him enough to wake up in a sombre mood or that I discovered I valued my freedom more than I valued him, but I didn’t. I’d had enough freedom in the last two years and I wanted nothing more now than for him to come back and rid me of this immobilising loneliness.

  Charlie being gone made me feel like I was missing half of my head or one of my lungs.

  I sat in my swivel chair at work, watching pink clouds drift across the sky when I heard my name being called.

  ‘Nell?’ Caleb, the tardy volunteer whose lateness that first night had caused me to be the one to pick up Charlie’s call.

  ‘Yeah!’ I called back to him, though I couldn’t see his face from here over the partition between us. All he was right now was a mop of curly black hair.

  ‘I’ve got Jackson.’

  ‘I’m open,’ I called back. ‘Send him over.’

  The call appeared on my screen and I accepted it before the second ring.

  ‘Jackson, how’s it going?’ I asked, putting on a cheerfulness that I didn’t quite feel. ‘I haven’t heard from you in a while.’

  ‘I’m really good actually, Nell,’ he replied, his voice so upbeat that it shocked me a little.

  ‘Wow, that’s great to hear. What have you been getting up to?’

  ‘I, well, I …’ He chuckled joyfully. ‘I actually got myself a girlfriend.’

  ‘Jackson, that’s terrific!’ I said. ‘I’m so pleased for you.’

  ‘Thanks, thanks. Her name is Audrey and I met her at work. She’s a cyclist and we’re gonna do this charity bike ride to raise money for you.’

  ‘For me?’ I asked, confused.

  ‘Well, not you exactly, the phone line, the charity,’ he said, excitedly.

  ‘That’s great.’

  ‘Well, you’ve all been so good to me, no one more than you, and I know that it’s your job and I’m not a friend, but it felt like you were, when I needed to believe it the most.’

  ‘I am your friend, Jackson. Just because we’ve never actually met doesn’t change that.’

  He chuckled again, emotionally this time. ‘If it’s okay, when we’ve raised the money, do you think I could drop it by the office? It’d be so good to put a face to the voice.’

  ‘We don’t usually accept walk-ins, but I think that if the rules had to be bent for anyone, it’d be you.’ There was a melancholy pause and I had to straighten myself in my chair and take a deep breath to pull myself together. ‘So, I guess this means that I won’t be hearing much of you from now on?’

  ‘I guess not. But I’m sure I’ll need to check back in every so often?’

  ‘I’d like that,’ I said, glad that I wasn’t the only one feeling this separation anxiety.

  ‘Well, ta-ra, Bab.’

  ‘Ta-ra, Jackson.’

  Between calls I went into the staff room – i.e. a tiny cordoned-off cubicle with a kettle, a microwave and several itchy chairs – and clicked on the kettle. I was feeling a little lethargic and so I scooped three teaspoons of Kenco Gold into my old mug, the pattern stripped away and destroyed after years of being assaulted by the dishwasher.

  I heard the monotone drone of Barry’s voice getting louder as he explained to a new volunteer that they were not permitted to take their headset home to use while playing Call of Duty.

  The volunteer, a girl in her early twenties, with poker-straight hair that turned from blonde at the root to fading teal at the ends, smiled at me when she noticed me standing by the kettle.

  Barry opened up a cabinet, from which spilled years of useless crap that had been shoved in there over the years, each time with that quick slam of the door that stops whatever you’ve just put in from coming straight back out.

  ‘All of this needs sorting,’ Barry droned. ‘If you think it’ll be useful put it back in, if not, chuck it.’

  The volunteer got down on her hands and knees as a pot of century-old Berol markers tumbled out and spilled across the floor.

  ‘I’ll get you a bin bag,’ Barry said, shuffling off.

  ‘You new?’ I asked, even though I knew full well that she was. You don’t spend five years working in a place without spotting fresh meat in a heartbeat.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ she said, turning and smiling. ‘Makayla.’ We shook hands as the bubbles inside the kettle built to a crescendo and it clicked off.

  ‘Nell,’ I replied. ‘He seems dull and humourless,’ I said nodding in the direction of Barry as he waddled back, barely lifting each foot from the ground as he walked, bin bag in hand. ‘But he’s a sweetheart really.’

  ‘If you say so.’ She pulled out a small cardboard box.

  I turned back around and went to the kettle, dousing the mound of coffee granules and watching them disintegrate as the water turned them liquid. I poured in the milk, using the teaspoon to crush the few defiant granules against the side of the mug.

  ‘What do you want doing with these?’ Makayla asked Barry as he tossed the bin bag down beside her.

  ‘Let me see,’ he said. I turned around to return to my cubicle, taking a mild interest in what she’d found in the depths of the cupboard. ‘Oh, these old things.’ In his hand he held a spool of stickers for the charity. ‘We got these as a sample from a start-up company. We only used them once though because they spelled one of the words wrong.’

  I stopped dead in my tracks and turned to Barry.

  ‘Let me see,’ I said, placing my coffee down on Dennis’s desk and ignoring his snide comment about me invading his personal space. I took the roll from Barry’s hands and unfurled a few inches. I let out a disbelieving laugh. There they were, hundreds of the sticker that Charlie had seen on the clock tower, the sticker that had saved his life, twice. There at the bottom was the same misspelled slogan ‘caring for your mental heath’. The only difference was that this one didn’t have a movie quote written in Sharpie around the edge.

  ‘Do you want them?’ Barry asked.

  ‘Erm, yeah,’ I replied. ‘You said we only used them once?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He chortled. ‘How is someone meant to trust us with their mental health when it looks like we can’t even spell it?’ He looked at Makayla and seemed peeved when he saw she wasn’t chuckling along.

  ‘I’ve seen one of these out in town. Do you remember who put it there?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, stopping there as if that was enough information on the subject.

  ‘Well?’ I prompted, growing impatient.

  ‘Someone came to us a few years back and wanted to volunteer, but we had no spaces and so I offered her the job of putting those stickers around town.’

  ‘Her?’ I asked. ‘Do you know who she was?’

  ‘I don’t recall the name,’ he said with an almost pained expression as he tried to regurgitate the memory. ‘But I remember she was pretty, real pretty. Redhead. Irish.’

  I left work in a sort of trance. Ned hadn’t believed it either when I’d told him that Abi had been the one to place the sticker at the top of the tower. Her actions years before her death, saving Charlie’s life when he couldn’t bear to grieve for her any longer. Charlie had asked me once if I believed in fate and I hadn’t been sure at the time, but right now, it seemed pretty real to me.

  I know we’d agreed to focus on ourselves, for Charlie to distance himself from me and concentrate on himself for a while, but no matter how hard I’d tried, I’d still been the first to break the pact. I’d sent Charlie a text asking him to call me when he got a moment, but I hadn’t heard anything from him as of yet.

  I walked towards Cool Beans, my instant caffeine fix not really doing much for me at this point in the day. I entered through the glass door and nodded my usual greeting to the tattooed supervisor before joining the queue.

  The first few times I’d visited the café after Charlie had left had been an emotional roller coaster. When I’d
walked through the door, my childlike hope would spike at the thought that I might just see him there, sitting at our communal table, ready for me to throw my lunch at him and force him into awkward conversation. Obviously, this hadn’t happened, of course, and even though I tried really hard not to let anything to do with Charlie affect how I felt about this place, it did seem somewhat tainted with heartache.

  ‘Any hot drinks?’ the supervisor at the till called and I approached with that awkward smile that always comes when you know someone by sight and then speak to them.

  ‘Americano please,’ I said and added a brownie to that for good measure. He frowned at me for a moment, which made me wonder what I’d done. He shook the frown away and smiled, gesturing for me to tap my card against the reader. It pinged and I uttered my thanks before walking to the end of the counter to wait for it.

  I pulled my phone from my pocket and checked for a response from Charlie, but there was none. I understood that distance was what we both needed right now. But even so, it still stung like abandonment.

  I sighed and pushed the phone back into my pocket as a young girl came up to the counter and presented me with my drink. ‘Do you want some milk with that?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ I replied.

  ‘And, while you’re here, would you like to donate to our charity of the month?’

  My change was still jangling in my pocket.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. She grinned and reached over to a plastic bucket, decorated in glitter and colourful lettering, which I’d somehow missed as I’d been standing there. There was even a string of battery-powered fairy lights wrapped around it to attract maximum attention. ‘What’s the cause?’ I asked.

  Her grin widened as the opportunity to bombard me with details came. ‘Healthy Minds, have you heard of them? Me and my boyfriend are doing a charity bike ride to raise money for them.’

  I frowned and tilted my head to the side as my brain slotted all of that information into place. ‘You’re not Audrey, are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said uncertainly. ‘How’d you know that?’

  ‘Nell?’ The supervisor stopped serving the young mother and son at the till, completely abandoning their order as he weaved his way out from behind the counter and stood in front of me with hopeful eyes. ‘I thought I recognised your voice when you ordered.’

  ‘No,’ I said in disbelief as a smile pulled my mouth up at the corners. ‘Jackson?’

  He pulled me into a hug and squeezed me so tightly that I could scarcely breathe.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  How many times had I seen him, smiled at him, been inches away from him? And all that time I’d known him, without being aware of it. He’d always seemed perfectly content every time I’d seen him. Sometimes, people’s ability to hide their true feelings from the world even surprised me.

  I guess I’d been playing into the exact same stereotypes that I always fought against whenever I thought of Jackson. I imagined him as a frightfully thin, very plain man who everyone would always refer to as a boy rather than the adult he was. But Jackson was nothing like my mental image of him. He was tall and broad, buff even, with big wide shoulders and sleeves of tattoos that snaked around toned forearms. His hair was longer than usual, not that that was saying much as it was usually shaved close to his scalp, but I guess that all of his personal choices were changing now that he had a girlfriend.

  That had happened with me and Joel. He’d always wanted to keep his hair short but I liked it long, so he’d kept it that way for me. I felt the twinge in my chest that came every time I thought about him and I almost felt myself reach for my phone to call him. But he didn’t want to talk to me; he’d told me so himself and I needed to give him time to come around to wanting to speak to me again, if ever.

  Jackson pulled away and began explaining to Audrey who I was. She seemed just as overjoyed as he did to finally put a face to the name and hugged me too, once Jackson had let me go.

  There was something about this moment that felt like the wrapping up of another loose end. I’d been afraid to leave Healthy Minds because I was worried about Jackson, but now he was moving on and leaving me behind, as he very well should.

  The other reason not to leave and pursue old dreams was Ned, but even he was moving on, not from work, but emotionally. The idea of Ned and Mum being together unnerved me, but if that was what made them both happy then who was I to hold them back?

  My ties with Joel had been severed and I doubted that he’d ever want to talk to me again. If he needed to, I’d be there, but if he didn’t then that was fine too.

  Even Charlie had moved on. I’d been so set on sticking around and not moving on for the wellbeing of other people, that I’d somehow fallen behind.

  What if I had just been what Charlie had needed during that dark period of his life and what if I’d only needed him to finally move on from Joel? Maybe he didn’t need me anymore and maybe I didn’t need him. The idea made me feel like I was splitting in two, but I knew that I had to stop waiting around for life to kick me in another direction and tread the path myself. Everyone seemed happy and settled. Except me.

  Maybe it was time to move on.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  One month later

  Charlie

  For such a tiny person, Kenna sure took up a lot of room. She always had done, sticking out her elbows or leaning at peculiar angles because she was wearing something too fitted that would stop her breathing if she sat like a regular person.

  ‘How’s Nell?’ she asked, as she absentmindedly twirled a ginger ringlet around her red-gel-tipped finger.

  I looked down into the almost empty ice cream tub in my hand and scraped the spoon across the bottom, making patterns on the milky cardboard. ‘She was fine last I talked to her.’

  ‘And when was that?’ she asked.

  ‘A while ago,’ I replied.

  I tossed my ice cream pot into the bin beside our bench and looked out at the pale, sunny sky over Clew Bay. Being here brought back the memory of when Nell found me, after I went AWOL at the memorial. How long ago that seemed now.

  ‘She wanted space and I need it too. So, that’s exactly what I’m givin’ her,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a shame that yer had to meet her when you did.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed, feeling the beginning of an ache inside my ribcage and trying to focus on the water to keep it from growing. ‘But the timing was wrong.’

  ‘Do you think you’ll go back?’ she asked and the words brought instant anxiety with them.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m healin’ here – I can feel it. I’ve stopped wakin’ up and wishin’ the day was over before it’s even begun and I know that me bein’ here is good for Carrick. I don’t know, I just feel like being here is right.’ I took a breath of fresh, salty air and I felt the warmth of home fill my chest. ‘She saved my life, I can never forget that, but I was a person I’ve never been before when we were together. Nell never met the old me; she only knew this version. If I get back to normal and then go back, I think I might be a stranger to her.’

  She sighed and turned to me, groaning as the waistband of her pencil skirt dug into her torso and pinched her lungs. ‘Charlie, you’re never gonna be the person you were before. People are always changin’. It doesn’t matter who you’re with, you’re always gonna be different. You pick up on the other person’s traits, the way they sit, their ways of thinkin’ and in the end you’re a mash-up of the two of yer.’ She rolled her eyes at me. ‘Before all of this, back when you were Abi’s version of Charlie, you could be a bit of a shit, not gonna lie, but I still loved yer. When yer went rogue and disappeared on us all, I still loved yer even then. And when you were Nell’s version of Charlie, I loved yer all the same.’

  ‘Which version am I now then?’ I asked.

  ‘I think that you’re just you. You and Abi were together from such a young age that I don’t think yer ever had a chance to find out who yer really were on your own. You
were always tryin’ to impress her and show her that you were worthy of her, flashin’ all those fancy clothes and watches around. But she never loved yer for your watches. Honestly, I think I prefer this incarnation of yer.’

  ‘Really? Yer prefer this mopin’, miserable eejit?’

  ‘Yeah, I do. I think yer needed a wound or two to size down that big old head of yours. It’s just a shame that the wound had to be Abi.’

  I felt it again, the lump in my throat, and I instinctively reached my hand inside my pocket and felt around until I found the sea glass with my fingers.

  ‘If only I’d not been distracted, she’d still be here now,’ I said, my voice clogging with emotion again.

  ‘What d’yer mean?’ Kenna asked and I looked up to see her meticulously pruned brows furrowed and her bottom lip jutting out.

  I cleared my throat. I had forgotten that I had never voiced any of this to Kenna before. God knows how she’d react to them. ‘Because, if I hadn’t gone to make her some tea and then been distracted by the news, I’d have seen that she wasn’t well and called the ambulance and she could’ve been saved.’ I braced myself for a slap. I almost turned my face so that she’d have easy access to my cheek. ‘If I’d gone back to her sooner, she might have lived.’

  ‘Christ, Charlie, is this what you’ve been carryin’ around with yer all this time? There was no savin’ her,’ Kenna said with a subtle shake of her head. ‘Yer really did just pass it all on to Mammy didn’t yer. She died instantly – that’s what the coroner said.’

  I felt something twang in my chest, like an air lock releasing. ‘Instantly?’

  ‘She suffered a massive pulmonary embolism. She died in a couple of seconds.’

  Sometime in that hour or so between me leaving the room and returning with her tea, she’d just switched off, like central heating. And this guilt I’d been carrying for so long had never been mine to carry.