Pictures of You

Chapter 57

57

Drew

Evie’s obvious shock at the photo of my parents is overtaken by Mum’s doctor turning up to perform the formalities. Pronounce her dead. I have to say it to myself to believe it, and even then it doesn’t seem real.

“I’m sorry, Drew,” she says, after she hands the form to the police. “This was not unexpected.”

But it was.

I shake her hand. “Thank you for coming out tonight.”

Even though we knew it was coming. Even though we’d talked about it. I don’t understand why I feel like I’m in some sort of shock, despite neon billboards blaring this exact outcome at us for years.

“Are there some clothes you’d like your mum to wear?” the funeral director says when we’re back inside. In this cast of thousands, I hadn’t even noticed his arrival.

I stare helplessly at Mum’s current attire—the old trousers with faded knees she used to wear while gardening, a tear where a rose thorn shredded the material at her thigh. An old button-down check shirt, the fabric thin from years of wear.

When I don’t answer, Evie places my phone down on the kitchen bench and comes to my side. “May I help?”

I’m barely processing the clothing task, when it occurs to me that Mum’s hands are dirty from pottering in the garden. I touch her fingers again and try to rub soil off her skin with my thumb, but it won’t budge.

Evie disappears into the hallway for a minute, and I hear the door of the linen press dragging along the carpet as she opens it. She reemerges seconds later with a washcloth, and runs the kitchen tap, waiting patiently for the water to warm up.

Mum doesn’t need the water warm. But Evie is making sure it’s at the perfect temperature anyway. She wrings out the excess liquid and holds the cloth out for me. I just stare at it, as if it’s somehow beyond me to know how to do this.

“Annie, I’m just going to pick up your hand,” Evie says softly, stepping close to Mum beside me. She cradles it gently, respectfully, in her palm. I assume she’s going to do the job herself, but then she reaches out and takes my hand too. Places the warm cloth in it. And helps me begin. It’s as if she instinctively knows I’ll want to remember I did this myself.

While I’m wiping the dirt off Mum’s skin, Evie fetches a nail brush and squirts some liquid soap onto it, running it under more warm water. This part she does do, and we follow that with some lavender hand cream that Mum had in the bathroom—each taking one hand and smoothing the lotion into her skin.

All of it is unnecessary. The people at the funeral home will take care of her. But it’s somehow the most intimate, bonding performance among the three of us, and seems to go some way toward making up for the violence I inflicted on this same body, only hours earlier, trying to save her life.

Evie leads me into Mum’s bedroom and flicks the light switch. I can barely enter the room, with its unmade bed, clothes draped across the chair in the corner, books stacked on the floor. She pulls open the wardrobe and beckons me to stand beside her as Mum’s floral scent spills into the room.

“She always looked lovely in this,” Evie says, reaching for a long, colorful dress in swirling blues and greens, with delicate, floaty sleeves. “What do you think?”

I feel the pressure of someone’s hand, placed gently on my shoulder.

“Yep?” I say, turning around and expecting to see the funeral director with another question about Mum’s wishes. But there’s nobody there.

“What was that?” Evie asks.

“Someone touched me on the shoulder,” I explain quietly. It was both impossible and unambiguous.

“It wasn’t me,” she says. Both of her hands are on the coat hanger holding up Mum’s dress, so I know that.

I face her, confused. But also hopeful that the hand belonged somehow to Mum, with a sign of approval, perhaps? A silent thank-you for all that I did to look after her? A final goodbye, sending me forward into the rest of my life just as she leaves hers? You’ll be okay, Drew.

Evie’s eyes fill with tears. For a fleeting moment, in this sacred space, while she holds Mum’s dress with the gentleness of an archivist handling a priceless garment in a museum, it’s just the three of us. Me, and the only two women I’ve ever loved.

That realization hits me hard in the chest and my heart bolts wildly. Maybe that’s what Mum was acknowledging here. What she was endorsing. Evie is now carefully selecting a pair of silver earrings from a glass plate on the dresser and looking to me for permission to open Mum’s underwear drawer. Nobody tells you how pragmatic death can be. I’m at a loss to know how I would ever have made it through this process without her.

I’m plunged into fresh turmoil at the sight of Mum lying on the gurney in a body bag minutes later, while the director carries a plastic bag full of the clothes Evie has helped me choose. As I help him push her through the house, careful not to bang her against walls and doorways, I realize this body we’re maneuvering gave me life . It carried me and pushed me into the world, and now it’s left me here—on my own. There’s something about seeing Mum pulled over the threshold of the home she loved, despite its faults, one last time, that just about breaks me.

Evie walks beside us out to the funeral director’s van. We each place a hand on Mum, on top of the thick fabric of the bag she is in now.

All the words I want to say escape me, and I simply pat the bag and lift my hand off her again. The very last touch. The bond severed.

The director nods and bows at Mum, then shuts the van door.

That’s it. The end.

And it’s just Evie and me now, standing in the driveway, with the feeling you get when you wave off loved visitors after a beautiful stay. Except it’s forever this time. And I’m devastated.

Without words, we turn and walk back inside. Evie slides down to the floor in the living room, her back against the couch, signaling that she’s not going anywhere.

I check the time. “Do you need to get back?” I ask. The last thing I want to do is set off Oliver.

She shakes her head. “I have nowhere to be. Oliver and I broke up.”

The admission hangs in the air. It’s only now that I notice how pale and fractured she looks, at such odds with the strength she’s displayed all night.

They broke up? My heart leaps at this news, only to be chased by a massive dose of guilt. Mum just died . How can I dredge myself so quickly out of grief and into any form of optimism, however fleeting?

“Sorry,” she says. “It’s not the time to talk about this. But he left. I threw him out. I can stay as long as you need.”

My eyes flick to her left hand. It’s bare. I have the preposterous thought that this miracle is Mum’s parting gift to me, that she arranged it, somehow, like some ethereal matchmaker from the afterlife. There’s something so poetic about the notion that I came into the world out of a relationship gone wrong with Oliver’s father, only to be handed a glimmer of hope with Oliver’s former fiancée, right when I’m at my lowest ebb. Hope, rising out of the ashes of loss.

“How are you feeling, Drew?” Evie asks, swiveling to face me.

I can’t admit the thoughts running through my mind. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Evie isn’t leaping into my arms. She looks as messed-up as me. “Overwhelmed,” I answer truthfully.

“We don’t have to think about anything tonight. I’m going to help you through this,” she tells me. “I have a lot of ground to make up as your best friend.”

Her friend. Yes.

“Although, what about Meg? Shouldn’t she be here instead?”

I should call her, I know. It’s just that she’ll try to fix this somehow. She’s one of those intensely optimistic people. Exhaustingly so, at times.

“Meg and I are just friends,” I assure her, even though she didn’t ask. Not friends like this.

I go through the open doorway into the kitchen and get two wineglasses and one of the bottles of cabernet sauvignon Mum had been saving for a “special occasion.” The irony of this being that event …

I wave it in Evie’s direction, and she nods.

“Yes, I think we need alcohol to discuss how you’re Oliver’s brother .”

“Half brother, technically. Born ten months apart.”

“Drew … Oliver has absolutely no idea about this, or he’d have said. He’ll hit the roof.”

Of course he doesn’t, and yes, he will. Why would our father destroy the perfection of Oliver’s world just to include me in it?

“Can you imagine? Oliver has always had it in for me,” I say.

“Because of me,” she explains, cautiously.

I look at her, wondering what she means. It’s not like there was ever anything for him to be jealous about here; it was very much the other way around.

“Will you confront him about it? Anderson, I mean.” She shivers, and I wonder what she’s witnessed in the Roche household over the years. “Presumably he has no idea you found out?”

There’s no way I’m going to confront him. I don’t need someone in my life who values me so little. I pass her the wine and sit on the floor beside her, then reach for Mum’s laptop on the coffee table in front of us. I need to start thinking about how to tell people.

“He controlled Mum the entire way through that relationship. He’s a narcissist. He always knew exactly where she was—he tracked her.”

“Tracked her? With what technology?”

“Private investigator. I think he was terrified she’d undo him.”

Evie’s mouth falls open. She lifts the glass to her lips and takes a large sip.

I open Mum’s email account. It’s full of spam and unread newsletters. “He had access to her bank accounts, long after he abandoned us. He wouldn’t go near me as a father, but he sent her rules for raising his son.”

Goose bumps rise on her arms.

“She met someone when I was about six. He was this wonderful man who made her happy. The only man I’ve ever looked at as anything resembling a father figure. Anderson destroyed that too.” I pick up my phone and look at the photo again. “The woman my mum became was nothing like that vibrant young nurse. She was anxious. Depressed. Paranoid.”

Evie has all but drained her glass during my monologue and holds it out to me. I splash in a large serving of wine and top mine off too.

She picks up her phone and fumbles through the settings, getting frustrated.

“What’s wrong?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing. Don’t worry.”

I do worry. A lot. I’ve tried not to go there—thinking the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but there have been signs all along. “Are your calendars still synced?” I ask.

She looks at me like she’s stunned I remember that. Or that I’d raise the trigger for our first fight, all those years ago. “I don’t want to un-sync them,” she admits, and my heart plunges. “I don’t want to provoke him.”

Provoke him to do what?

Anger stampedes up and surpasses my state of shock, blistering through the denial. The idea that Evie is willing to stay tethered to Oliver after a breakup to avoid antagonizing him makes me furious.

“I can create a second calendar and use that,” she suggests, stifling tears. Trying to put on a brave face. “Sorry, tonight is meant to be about you.”

That’s just it, though. So much of who I am is about her. I’ve grieved in the silence between us. Craved her company. As ludicrous as it sounds, I feel like we’re a team. A partnership. Not a couple, exactly …

I stretch my arm across her shoulders and pull her against me, stroking her mess of curls, and she lets out a strangled sob that is probably about Mum and Oliver and her and me and just how complicated life can be, and it breaks me all over again.