Pictures of You

Chapter 60

60

Drew

This note from Mum has me gutted. It’s flung me into a reality I can’t yet face or talk about.

I’ve seen her close to giving up on life too many times over the years to count. Part of me is racked with guilt that I didn’t see the email this morning and get here in time to intervene. Part of me is relieved that she’s succeeded, and her torture is over.

All of me puts the blame firmly at my father’s feet. I didn’t know he was back in her life, but showing up here tonight proves it. It explains the way she’s been acting.

Anderson trips backward down the garden path and into his BMW. He slams the door. Runs over the curb, flattening one of Mum’s flowerbeds as he screeches off. As he turns the corner at the end of the street and the roar of the engine fades, we gulp the silence, then retreat inside the house.

Evie and I stare at each other in the hallway.

“She had shriveled recently,” I tell her. “Not from the cancer or the treatment. Shriveled in her soul. It was as if she’d lost the strength to will herself through life.”

“Given up the battle with her past,” Evie says, as if she’s been inside Mum’s head.

I don’t want her empathizing this strongly with the idea.

“Mum’s life was so messed up, over so many years—largely because of that man—she couldn’t find a way to make it bearable.”

Thank God Evie has split up with Oliver. The pattern needs to break.

And I need to go through Mum’s emails and work out how my horrible father pushed her this far. He might not have driven the final nail, but I’ll bet he handed it to her. Why would he have turned up here on the day of her death, after avoiding her for years, if he wasn’t tormenting her in some new way?

Evie steps toward me wordlessly. She places her hands on either side of my head as if trying to calm my thoughts. Then on my chest, over my beating heart, like she’s trying to heal it as we stand here, in the wake of Mum’s life, grief swirling between us and around us like a spell, binding us together. “Drew, I’m so sorry this is how it happened,” she whispers.

Death is complicated enough, even when it’s straightforward.

She leans in to me, head pressed against my chest as my arms come around her. Two human beings, holding each other through one of the most vulnerable passages a person can face: these first fragile hours after a loss, when the world has shifted on its axis and nothing will ever be the same again.

I kiss the top of her head and she lifts her face to mine. I lose myself in the sweet scent of wine on her breath, and her perfume, and the compassion in her eyes that I’d first noticed all those years ago on the beach, that night with Mum. I take in her features up close for the first time. We’re both emotionally shaky and tipsy and wired, inhabiting this strange, afterdeath quiet together. I brush the dark curls away from her face, my thumb tracing her cheekbones, all sense leaving my brain.

She’s startled when I move closer, and pulls back slightly, eyes flicking upward, surveying me. Questioning my intent?

I would think it was clear. My fingers slip through her hair. I draw her closer to me again, my lips finding hers as I push her back against the wall in the hallway, one hand traveling to her waist, squeezing it. Pulling her against me as I kiss her. Not nearly close enough.

A guttural sound emerges from me, part desire, part loss, part bargaining with the universe not to shatter this moment because, even now, the way she’s responding to my touch, this feels transient.

“Drew,” she whispers. “What are we doing?”

She has no idea about all the things I’ve wanted to do with her since I walked into that art studio and saw her perched at her desk in her immaculate school uniform with her meticulous life plan, challenging the status quo of the school. And my life .

The shadow of death blurs the rules, doesn’t it? Her breakup. My loss. This ephemeral glimpse of a parallel universe in which it was always her and me.

“Evie …”

She places her hands on my chest and pushes me back. Gently. But decisively.

I know she can’t. And I know why she can’t. And it kills me.

I feel like I’ve lost the two women in my life within hours.