Chapter 56
56
Evie
“I came as soon as I could,” I tell Drew, fighting back tears as I dump my handbag onto the kitchen table. I probably haven’t been in this room since I last studied for an English exam there, when there would have been textbooks and junk food spread all over. Drew is standing here, in adult form, exactly where he used to annoy me as a teenager, eating cereal and teasing me about Oliver.
There is no teasing now. And, despite the lapse in our friendship and the awkwardness of our quick reunion just days ago at my graduation, I throw myself into his arms. “I’m so desperately sorry, Drew.”
I’m not just sorry about his mum. I’m sorry about my silence. Sorry I didn’t try harder to clear up what happened that night he abandoned me. Sorry I listened to Oliver. And I’m sorry we let our lives decouple from each other’s so convincingly it’s taken a tragedy to bring us back.
When I go to pull out of the hug, he grabs me harder, holding me to his chest. I wrap my arms tighter around a body that feels unfamiliarly tall and broad, despite how close we used to be. His heart is racing. And breaking. I could tell the latter just by the torment on his face when he opened the door. The haunting shock in his eyes as he looked straight through the gap in our fractured friendship and met me here in this moment.
“Evie, it’s me,” he’d said on the phone. “Can you come to Mum’s? I need you.”
I hadn’t asked why. Hadn’t needed to. I knew from the tone in his voice what had happened. That almost telepathic connection, intact after everything else had been shredded between us, brought me up sharp on the way over in the car as I turned onto his street and arrived to the glow of lights from the paramedics. The knowledge that, even after we fell out, I’m still the first person he calls suddenly means everything.
They have Annie on a gurney. My heart aches at the sight of her. She’s smaller than I remember, her skin drawn, lips a bluish gray. I’ve never been exposed to death up close like this. When my grandpa died when I was little, I went to the funeral, but Mum and Dad shielded me from the burial.
I don’t want to be this close to it now, and I feel myself shaking. But this is not about me, even though Drew shields my face, aware of my response to her.
“Cup of tea?” I manage to ask, turning the other way.
Drew doesn’t look like he wants tea, or that he’d say no to a cup. He is completely and utterly lost, as if deciding one way or the other on tea would be beyond him.
I fill up the kettle and sit beside him while a police officer asks questions.
“Do you know what she last ate?”
Drew shakes his head.
There’s half a sandwich on a plate on the bench beside the kettle. The bread is dry, the cheese curled up at the edges. “Perhaps that?” I offer.
The idea of the half-eaten sandwich almost undoes me. That we could just step out of life one day, unfinished. Books half read. Wet washing still in the machine. Places unseen. Ambitions unmet. Grudges held, long after they should have been …
The sandwich seems to undo Drew too. It’s the simplicity. She deserved something scrumptious for her last meal. As he stares at the stale bread, I grieve for the years of support he’s needed in my absence. I have every intention of making up every moment we missed.
“We need to check the air vents in the ceiling,” the officer says. “Standard procedure. Can we see what medication she was on?”
I glance at all the packets and bottles on the bench. Pain relief that never quite worked. And I don’t have a clue what to say. I want to make it better. Lighten it. Soften it? Obliterate it altogether. But somehow I hold back that impulse and manage just to sit with it at the kitchen table, while the kettle sings.
The officer excuses herself and says she’s going to check the garden before it gets dark. Why can’t people just slip off at home in peace? All this suspicion, when it’s abundantly clear from her frail appearance, the wad of medical records Drew fetched from the study, and the fact that she’s frequently visited by in-home caretakers that Annie had been sick for years. I’m stung by even more guilt that I stepped so far away and left him struggling with this.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell him again, slipping my hand into his. “About your mum, but about so much more.”
He leads me through the cluttered house and out into the front garden, where we sit on a bench seat under Annie’s favorite silver birch trees. Turning to face me, he says, “Evie, the night of the formal …”
I can’t believe he’s raising that now. “It doesn’t matter, Drew, honestly!”
“No, you don’t understand. Mum sort of … collapsed that night. She ended up in an ambulance. They admitted her.”
The horror of this news descends over me. The idea of Drew at seventeen rushing his mum to the hospital while I became more and more incensed that he wasn’t collecting me for a trivial dance … My thinking at the time that he was the bad friend.
“I felt so bad that I let you down, but I knew if I told you, this would happen.”
“What?”
“You’d end up here with me.”
He’s right. Of course I would have. I’d have bowled up to the ER in my Jane Austen dress before even conceiving of getting changed and going to meet Oliver. I’d have pushed my way to Drew’s side.
“The thing is, it was my fault,” Drew admits. “That night, and the way her health plummeted afterward. I triggered it.”
That can’t be right.
He takes out his phone and scrolls through the photos.
“You don’t have to go through this now,” I tell him, gently. But he ignores me, and when he finds what he’s looking for, his expression contorts again.
“This is a photo of Mum with my father.” He passes the phone over.
I look at her first. So young and pretty and light and alive . So like Drew. Sunlight bouncing off her face, upturned and looking at …
I zoom in. Then look back at Drew.
This can’t be.
I know that stance. That set of the jaw. The steely glare at the camera, annoyed at having to pose for a photo. I know it, because I saw precisely the same body language play out last week when he was asked to pose for a photo at Oliver’s graduation.