“You okay?” Dad turns, as if he guesses something of what’s going through my head.
“Fine.”
“Good girl.” He puts a hand briefly on my shoulder.
Mum is already at the door as we pull up. I suspect she has actually been standing by the window for the past half hour. Dad puts one of my bags on the step and then comes back to help me out, hoisting the other over his shoulder.
I place my cane carefully on the paving stones, and I feel the twitching of curtains behind me as I make my way slowly up the path. Look who it is, I can hear them whispering. What do you think she’s done now?
Dad steers me forward, watching my feet carefully, as if they might suddenly shoot out and go somewhere they shouldn’t. “Okay there?” he keeps saying. “Not too fast now.”
I can see Granddad hovering behind Mum in the hall, wearing his checked shirt and his good blue jumper. Nothing has changed. The wallpaper is the same. The hall carpet is the same, the lines in the worn pile visible from where Mum must have vacuumed that morning. I can see my old blue anorak hanging on the hook. Eighteen months. I feel as if I have been away for a decade.
“Don’t rush her,” Mum says, her hands pressed together. “You’re going too fast, Bernard.”
“She’s hardly flipping Mo Farah. If she goes any slower we’ll be moonwalking.”
“Watch those steps. Should you stand behind her, Bernard, coming up the steps? You know, in case she falls backward?”
“I know where the steps are,” I say through gritted teeth. “I only lived here for twenty-six years.”
“Watch she doesn’t catch herself on that lip there, Bernard. You don’t want her to smash the other hip.”
Oh, God, I think. Is this what it was like for you, Will? Every single day?
And then my sister is in the doorway, pushing past Mum. “Oh, for God’s sake, Mum. Come on, Hopalong. You’re turning us into a freaking sideshow.”
Treena wedges her arm under my armpit and turns briefly to glare at the neighbors, her eyebrows raised as if to say really? I can almost hear the swishing of curtains as they close.
“Bunch of bloody rubberneckers. Anyway, hurry up. I promised Thomas he could see your scars before I take him to youth club. God, how much weight have you lost? Your boobs must look like two tangerines in a pair of socks.”
It is hard to laugh and walk at the same time. Thomas runs to hug me so that I have to stop and put a hand out against the wall to keep my balance as we collide. “Did they really cut you open and put you back together?” he says. His head comes up to my chest. He is missing four front teeth. “Grandpa says they probably put you back together all the wrong way. And God only knows how we’ll tell the difference.”
“Bernard!”
“I was joking.”
“Louisa.” Granddad’s voice is thick and hesitant. He reaches forward unsteadily and hugs me and I hug him back. He pulls away, his old hands gripping my arms surprisingly tightly, and frowns at me, a mock anger.
“I know, Daddy. I know. But she’s home now,” says Mum.
“You’re back in your old room,” says Dad. “I’m afraid we redecorated with Transformers wallpaper for Thom. You don’t mind the odd Autobot and Predacon, right?”
“I had worms in my bottom,” says Thomas. “Mum says I’m not to talk about it outside the house. Or put my fingers up my—”
“Oh, good Lord,” says Mum.
“Welcome home, Lou,” says Dad, and promptly drops my bag on my foot.
3
Looking back, for the first nine months after Will’s death I was in a kind of daze. I went straight to Paris and simply didn’t go home, giddy with freedom, with the appetites that Will had stirred in me. I got a job at a bar favored by expats where they didn’t mind my terrible French, and I grew better at it. I rented a tiny attic room in the 16th, above a Middle Eastern restaurant, and I would lie awake at night and listen to the sound of the late drinkers and the early morning deliveries and every day I felt like I was living someone else’s life.
Those early months, it was as if I had lost a layer of skin—I woke up laughing, or crying. I felt everything more intensely, saw everything as if a filter had been removed. I ate new foods, walked strange streets, spoke to people in a language that wasn’t mine.
Sometimes I felt haunted by him, as if I were seeing it all through his eyes, hearing his voice in my ear.
What do you think of that, then, Clark?
I told you you’d love this.
Eat it! Try it! Go on!
I felt lost without our daily routines. It took weeks for my hands not to feel useless without daily contact with his body: the soft shirt I would button; the warm, motionless hands I would wash gently; the silky hair I could still feel between my fingers. I missed his voice, his abrupt, hard-earned laugh, the feel of his lips against my fingers, the way his eyelids would lower when he was about to drop off to sleep. My mother, still aghast at what I had been part of, had told me that while she loved me, she could not reconcile this Louisa with the daughter she had raised. So with the loss of my family as well as the man I had loved, every thread that had linked me to who I was had been abruptly cut. I felt as if I had simply floated off, untethered, to some unknown universe.
So I acted out a new life. I made casual, arm’s-length friendships with other travelers: young English students on gap years; Americans retracing the steps of literary heroes, certain that they would never return to the Midwest; wealthy young bankers; day-trippers; a constantly changing cast that drifted in and through and past, escapees from other lives. I smiled and I chatted and I worked and I told myself I was doing what he had wanted. I had to take some comfort, at least, in that. Didn’t I?
Winter loosened its grip and the spring was beautiful. Then almost overnight I woke up one morning and realized I had fallen out of love with the city. Or, at least, I didn’t feel Parisian enough to stay. The stories of the expats began to sound wearyingly similar, the Parisians started to seem unfriendly, or, at least, I noticed, several times a day, the myriad ways in which I would never quite fit in. The city, compelling as it was, felt like a glamorous couture dress I had bought in haste but that didn’t quite fit me after all. I handed in my notice and went traveling around Europe.
No two months had ever left me feeling more inadequate. I was lonely almost all the time. I hated not knowing where I was going to sleep each night, was permanently anxious about train timetables and currency, and had difficulty making friends when I didn’t trust anyone I met. And what could I say about myself, anyway? When people asked me, I could give them only the most cursory details. All the stuff that was important or interesting about me was what I couldn’t share. Without someone to talk to, every sight I saw—whether it was the Trevi Fountain or a canal in Amsterdam—felt simply like a name on a list that I needed to check off. I spent the last week on a beach in Greece that reminded me too much of a beach I had been on with Will only months before, and finally after a week of sitting on the sand fending off bronzed men who all seemed to be called Dmitri and trying to tell myself I was actually having a good time I gave up and returned to Paris. Mostly because that was the first time it had occurred to me that I had nowhere else to go.