The Reunion (11 page)

‘What did the girls say?’ Andrew asked her. ‘Are they having a good time at your parents’?’

‘Seem to be,’ Natalie replied. She was standing with her back to him, refolding his boxer shorts, placing them neatly in the top drawer of the oak dresser.

‘Did you speak to both of them?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

‘Has Grace been practising her violin?’

‘So she says.’

‘Good.’ He waited a moment, for her to turn back to him, so that he could see her face. He could tell, from the way she was standing, the set of her shoulders, that she was hurting. He put the empty suitcase on the floor and approached her, placing a hand gently between her shoulder blades. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, but he could tell by her voice, thin, a little high, that she was struggling. He took the last of the clothes from her hands and put them in the drawer, steered her back to the bed. She allowed him to manipulate her, silent, supine. She lay down, facing away from him, and he kicked off his shoes and lay behind her, his hand placed on her lower back. She liked the warmth, it seemed to ease the tension.

‘I wish,’ she said softly, after a few minutes, ‘I wish we could just let all this go. I wish you could let it all go.’

‘I know.’ But he couldn’t, he would not be persuaded.

‘It feels like poison.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know…’ Her voice was breaking a little.

‘You need your pills?’

‘Please.’ Her voice was tiny, trapped at the base of her throat.

Andrew got to his feet and went into the bathroom, rooted through her toiletry bag for her painkillers, the strong ones. There they were, six of twelve left, stamped into their silver sheet, the reverse of which bore a warning about addiction. Not Nat, she was too strong. She didn’t take them often, but today was a bad day. It was the plane, yesterday, the driving, the tension. She’d be better tomorrow. He poured her a glass of water and took it through to her. She propped herself up on one elbow and swallowed two pills in quick succession, jerking her head back as she took them, eyes shut, throat exposed.

She lay back down, reaching one arm back, a signal for him to join her. He lay down behind her, slipped his hand under her top, gently massaging her lower back. ‘Our life is good,’ she said softly. ‘We have family and work and each other. I don’t want all this… the past, I don’t want it to poison our well. That’s what I mean. There’s too much sadness and too much hurt and too much blame. We moved on, we made our lives. It is not our fault, not
your
fault, that others failed.’

‘Nat…’

‘No. Let me say this. Jen and Lilah will always be the women you hurt. You can’t see them any other way. But…’ Carefully, she rolled over so that she could face him, as he watched the pain cross her face like a shadow. ‘You’ve already paid, in full, one, two, three hundred times over, for anything you did wrong. Only you can’t see that. All you can ever be with them is guilty. You still want them to forgive you. I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life asking for forgiveness. You don’t deserve that.’ She closed her eyes and he kissed her, lightly, on her lips. He tried to think of a response, but she wasn’t done. Eyes still shut, she said: ‘I want our life to be about us, to be about now.’ Her voice faltered a little. ‘I don’t want to live with ghosts.’

He reached around her and pulled her closer. ‘I know you don’t, love.’

He’d never quite been able to explain to her that he
did
want to live with ghosts. It was his way of accepting what happened, his path to redemption. And it wasn’t about torturing himself, which is exactly what Nat would have thought. Every day, he thought of him. That was how he coped. That was how he lived with it.

He didn’t think, at first, that he would be able to. He gave himself a week. Get through that week and then we’ll see. The morning of the funeral, six days after the accident, he got up early. He and Lilah were staying in a grubby B&B in the centre of Cork, the room was cramped and too warm with no air conditioning. When they opened the windows the sounds from the street made it impossible to sleep. Lilah slept. She had some pills she’d got from her mother.

Andrew took one of her cigarettes and leaned out over the railing, looking down two storeys to the street below, and smoked. The sun shone maddeningly bright, it was warm already, even at seven in the morning, and it was loud, too: the noise of bottles clinking, the thump of beer barrels slamming onto the street. The cigarette made him retch, he only ever touched them when he was drunk and that morning he was terrifyingly sober. He felt hyper-aware: of the unpleasant tickle of nicotine on the inside of his mouth, his T-shirt clinging to his lower back with sweat, the sound of Lilah breathing behind him, the sense of terror rising, from the pit of his stomach, into his chest and then to his throat. He thought of Jen, whom he hadn’t seen in five days, not since the morning after, at the hospital. He thought of Natalie, still unconscious. He thought of Maggie, Conor’s mother. He thought, briefly, of the fact that with a minimum of effort he could pitch forward over this railing and it would be over.

Later, as he tried to tie his shoelaces with shaking hands, he realised that after this week, there would be another one, and another one after that, and that he would have to try to find a way to get through all those days and weeks, because he knew in his heart that he would not be pitching himself over any railings, not today or any other day. Lilah came out of the bathroom, knelt at his feet and kissed him. He could smell the alcohol on her breath. It was quarter to nine in the morning. ‘You sure about this?’ she asked him.

He wasn’t, he was terrified, but he went anyway. He didn’t have everything figured out, not until later, and not without help. But that day was the starting point. Since he was never going to be able to live without it, he had to live with it. And, ridiculous as it sounded, he now lived if not comfortably, then at the very least peacefully with Conor’s ghost.

Nat’s eyes were closed – the pills made her drowsy, he thought she might have drifted off to sleep – but when he tried to move away, she slipped her arm around him. He drew her in closer, whispered into her hair.

‘There was more to us, you know, than sadness and hurt and blame, wasn’t there? Don’t you remember? How we once were?’

Thursday 21 November 1996

Dearest Andrew,

I hope this letter finds you well. I have just finished writing another, which will be sent to the trial judge as a reference of your character. Since I want, as best I can, to ease the suffering that you are feeling, I thought I would let you know what I have said.

The judge will know, of course, that you are now and have always been an honest, law-abiding, hard-working young man. They don’t need me to tell them that. There are records, I’ve no doubt, of your academic and other achievements, those achievements that can be measured with grades or rewarded with prizes. Some things, though, aren’t so easily quantified.

So I have told them of your goodness. That you were a loyal friend to my son, a man he looked up to, a man he counted on. I told them that of Conor’s group of friends, I would identify you not only as the kindest among them, but the most responsible. I know full well that you made a terrible mistake that day, but I know that you were not alone in that mistake.

Difficult as it may be for you to imagine, I was young once too. I dimly recall what it feels like, to be on the cusp of adulthood, those few years when the world stretches out before you and you feel yourself to be utterly invincible. Yes, of course, it is an illusion, but there can be few amongst us (including, I assume, the trial judge) who didn’t feel it, who cannot look back and remember that we once took stupid risks and laughed at our own audacity later. For most of us, the very great, lucky majority, those risks don’t cost us, or at least don’t cost us much. You were not lucky, neither was my son.

Most important, though, as I have written in my letter, is that the last thing, the very last thing on earth that my son would have wanted, would have been to see you punished any more than you have already been. The idea of you going to prison would have been horrifying to him, as it is to me.

That, Andrew, is more or less what I have written to be presented as evidence to the judge. This is what I have to say to you. This thing you have done, it could destroy you. It could ruin your life. It has taken your best friend, it has taken your career. I imagine it has taken a lot more besides.

You could let it destroy you. I hope you will not. You could let it define you, too, and I’m not entirely sure that would be a bad thing. It sounds rather trite to say to you: make sure that something good comes out of this, but that is what I want you to do. Don’t run away from it, don’t hide from it. Let it sit with you. Let it become a part of you.

Live a good life, whatever that means to you. Find someone to love, someone who loves you. I don’t know if that’ll be that tall blonde drink of water you’re knocking around with right now, or whether it’ll be someone else. Make it someone who values you.

Don’t fight it. Let it define you, just don’t let it consume you. It’s a fine line, I’m sure. I hope that you can find it.

Now, I know you have enough guilt to be getting on with, so listen to me: don’t you worry about me. I have Ronan, and I have a wonderful daughter-in-law in Clara, and soon there’s to be a baby, too – I’m to be a grandmother and I can’t tell you how excited I am about that. I’ll survive this. So will you. Conor wouldn’t have it any other way.

Good luck.

All my love,

Maggie

NATALIE LEFT ANDREW
sitting on the edge of the bed, texting. She closed the bathroom door and ran herself a bath. She’d already had a shower that morning, but sometimes a hot bath was all that would do it. Andrew was chatting to the girls, something he managed quite happily by text. Nat couldn’t bear the text speak, the ‘how r u’, the punctuated smiley faces. She liked to speak in full sentences, to spell and punctuate correctly, even when communicating electronically. These things were important.

Andrew was better at going with the flow, which was probably why Grace and Charlotte’s preference appeared to have switched from mother to father over the past couple of years. Natalie tried not to be hurt by this. It was inevitable, really; Andrew had always been the cooler one. Not that that was difficult. Natalie was steadfastly, resolutely uncool. Always had been. It was the coolest thing about her, Andrew always said. He, however, had found a way to be
ironically
down with the kids without generating the kind of gold medal-winning eye rolling which Nat was greeted with when she tried to communicate with them on their level.

She lowered herself gently into the bath. One of her greatest pleasures, this. She liked to get into the bath when there was barely any water in it, lie as flat as she could, feel the heat build around her. She let her head slip down, so that her ears were underwater and the sound of her breathing was amplified. Beyond that there were other sounds, unidentifiable sounds, people moving around the house, walking up and down the stairs, something else, deeper, further away, a voice, low and steady. She splashed water over her chest and torso, wriggled her hips a little, feeling the tension in her body seep out into the water. Her head was buzzing slightly from the pills – they gave her the merest hint of a high, made her throat dry, made her feel like she wanted a cigarette.

She hadn’t smoked a cigarette in sixteen years; she gave up in hospital. Didn’t have much choice really. Unconscious for ten days, unable to get out of bed for another forty-one. Being forced to quit smoking was the silver lining, her mother said. Her mother liked to look for the silver lining. On one occasion, a birthday or a Christmas, something boozy, her mother announced to her guests that her Natalie had been in a terrible accident, but something good came out of it: she got Andrew.

When all the guests were gone, Natalie called mother cruel and ridiculous, and they didn’t speak for days. It
was
ridiculous. What, after all, did her mother really know about it? She hadn’t been there. She hadn’t seen the way Andrew had started to look at her, that summer at the French house, and then afterwards too. Sometimes she caught it, just out of the corner of her eye, when they were walking back from the cinema or having lunch together in the pub, she’d catch him watching her. Natalie’s mother hadn’t been privy to the conversations that they had, late into the night, night after night, when Lilah was out getting wasted, careening off the rails, when Andrew didn’t know what to do with her.

Her mother didn’t know. But if she didn’t know, if she was so ridiculous, then why was Natalie so rattled by it? Why did it hurt her so much? In the deepest, secret part of her, she knew, although she never allowed the thought to coalesce, to force itself to the forefront. She knew that even if she didn’t believe it, others did. Lilah certainly did. Jen might, she wasn’t sure.