For two weeks I slept on the sofa of a girl I’d worked with at the bar, while I tried to figure out what to do next. Recalling a conversation I’d had with Will about careers, I wrote to several colleges about fashion courses, but I had no portfolio of work to show them and they rebuffed me politely. The course I had originally won after Will died was awarded to someone else because I had failed to defer. I could apply again next year, the administrator said, in the tones of someone who knew I wouldn’t.
I looked online at jobs websites and realized that, despite everything I had been through, I was still unqualified for any of the kinds of jobs I might actually be interested in doing. And then by chance, just as I was wondering what to do next, Michael Lawler, Will’s lawyer, rang me and suggested it was time to do something with the money Will had left me. It was the excuse to move that I needed. He helped me negotiate a deal on a scarily overpriced two-bedroom flat on the edge of the Square Mile—a neighborhood I chose largely because I remembered Will once talking about the wine bar on the corner and it made me feel a bit closer to him—and there was enough money left over with which to furnish it. Then six weeks later I came back to England, got a job at the Shamrock and Clover, slept with a man called Phil whom I would never see again, and waited to feel as if I had really started living.
Nine months on I was still waiting.
• • •
I didn’t go out much that first week home. I was sore and grew tired quickly, so it was easy to lie in bed and doze, wiped out by extrastrength painkillers, and tell myself that letting my body recover was all that mattered. In a weird way, being back in our little family house suited me; it was the first place I had managed to sleep more than four hours at a stretch since I had left; it was small enough that I could always reach out for a wall to support myself. Mum fed me, Granddad kept me company (Treena had gone back to college, taking Thom with her), and I watched a lot of daytime television, marveling at its never-ending advertisements for loan companies and stairlifts, and its preoccupation with minor celebrities whom the better part of a year abroad had left me unable to recognize. It was like being in a little cocoon, one that, admittedly, had a whacking great elephant squatting in its corner.
We did not talk about anything that might upset this delicate equilibrium. I would watch whatever celebrity news that daytime television served up and then say at supper, “Well, what about that Shayna West, then, eh?” And Mum and Dad would leap on the topic gratefully, remarking that she was a trollop or had nice hair or that she was no better than she should be. We covered Bargains That Could Be Found in Your Attic (“I always wonder what that Victorian planter of your mother’s would have been worth . . . ugly old thing”) and Ideal Homes in the Country (“I wouldn’t wash a dog in that bathroom”). I did not think beyond each mealtime, beyond the basic challenges of getting dressed and brushing my teeth and completing whatever tiny tasks my mother set me (“You know, love, when I’m out, if you could sort out your washing, I’ll do it with my coloreds”).
But like a creeping tide, the outside world steadily insisted on intruding. I heard the neighbors asking questions of my mother as she hung out the washing. “Your Lou home, then, is she?” And Mum’s uncharacteristically curt response: “She is.”
I found myself avoiding the rooms in the house from which I could see the castle. But I knew it was there, the people in it living, breathing links to Will. Sometimes I wondered what had happened to them. While in Paris I had been forwarded a letter from Mrs. Traynor, thanking me formally for everything I had done for her son. “I am conscious that you did everything you could.” But that was it. That family had gone from being my whole life to a ghostly remnant of a time I wouldn’t allow myself to remember.
Now, as our street sat moored in the shadow of the castle for several hours every evening, I felt the Traynors’ presence like a rebuke.
I’d been there for two weeks before I realized that Mum and Dad no longer went to their social club. “Isn’t it Tuesday?” I asked on the third week as we sat around the dinner table. “Shouldn’t you be gone by now?”
They glanced at each other. “Ah, no. We’re fine here,” Dad said, chewing on a piece of his pork chop.
“I’m fine by myself, honestly,” I told them. “I’m much better now. And I’m quite happy watching television.” I secretly longed to sit, unobserved, with nobody else in the room. I had barely been left alone for more than half an hour at a time since I’d come home. “Really. Go out and enjoy yourselves. Don’t mind me.”
“We . . . we don’t really go to the club anymore,” said Mum, not looking at me as she sliced through a potato.
“People . . . they had a lot to say. About what went on.” Dad shrugged. “In the end it was easier just to stay out of it.” The silence that followed this disclosure lasted a full six minutes.
And there were other, more concrete reminders of the life I had left behind. Ones that wore skin-tight running pants with special wicking properties.
It was on the fourth morning that Patrick jogged past our house when I realized it might be more than coincidence. I had heard his voice the first day and limped blearily to the window, peering through the blind. And there he was below me, stretching out his hamstrings while talking to a girl with a blond ponytail and clad in matching blue Lycra so tight I could pretty much figure out what she’d had for breakfast. They looked like two Olympians missing a bobsled. I stood back from the window in case he looked up and saw me, and within a minute they were gone again, jogging down the road, backs erect, legs pumping, like a pair of glossy turquoise carriage ponies.
Two days later I was getting dressed when I heard them again. Patrick was saying something loudly about carb loading, and this time the girl flicked a suspicious gaze toward my house, as if she were wondering why they had stopped in exactly the same place twice.
On the third day I was in the front room with Granddad when they arrived. “We should practice sprints,” Patrick was saying loudly. “Tell you what, you go to the fourth lamppost and back and I’ll time you. Two-minute intervals. Go!”
Granddad looked at me, and then rolled his eyes meaningfully.
“Has he been doing this the whole time I’ve been back?”
Granddad’s eyes rolled pretty much into the back of his head.
I watched through the net curtains as Patrick fixed his eyes on his stopwatch, his best side presented to my window. He was wearing a black fleece zip-up top and matching Lycra shorts, and as he stood, a few feet from the other side of the curtain, I was able to gaze at him, quietly amazed that this was someone I had been sure, for so long, I’d loved.
“Keep going!” he yelled, looking up from his stopwatch. And like an obedient gun dog, the girl touched the lamppost beside him and bolted away again. “Forty-two point three-eight seconds,” he said approvingly when she returned, panting. “I reckon you could shave another point five of a second off that.”