Chapter 29
‘Can you get your shoulder out of my face, fartface?’
‘Can you get your elbow out of my ribs, poohead?’
‘I’ve got the bed wetter’s car seat in my face! I can barely move without fracturing my skull.’
‘Well, I can barely listen to anything you say without fracturing your skull!’
‘I don’t wet the bed!’
If Jo hadn’t been driving at fifty kilometres per hour, she would have thumped her head against the steering wheel in exasperation at least three times.
‘Is this the truth about having multiple children that no one tells you?’ Adrián asked weakly. ‘How have you survived this for fourteen years?’
‘It’s the three of them,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘Mine aren’t usually like this. Adding a third has tipped them over into insanity.’
‘Insanity is right. Why did we bring them again?’
Jo didn’t bother to answer. He’d been standing there when Liss and Dec had run after them through the foyer, dragging Oscar behind them, demanding their own freedom from wedding hell. They hadn’t exactly been able to say no.
‘How long do you think this is going to take?’ she asked. It was eleven o’clock and the wedding was in three hours. She imagined there wasn’t a lot Adrián could say about a stolen guitar, but she also didn’t want to make any assumptions about the efficiency of the police in this tourist area. She’d been shocked to discover the guitar actually was worth several thousand pounds and was insured, so he needed to go home tomorrow with a police report at least.
‘It probably won’t take long enough for us to miss the wedding,’ he quipped.
She eyed him. ‘I only hope someone will text us at least if they decide not to go through with it,’ Jo mumbled.
‘Shh! Do you want Oscar to run away again?’
‘Ehm, I need to pee!’ Oscar called out. ‘But I don’t wet the bed.’
‘Hang on, sweetie,’ Jo called back. ‘We’ll be there in five minutes.’
Adrián’s gaze snapped to her and she could feel the unasked question: Did you just call my son ‘sweetie’?
‘Okay, I’ll… try,’ Oscar said, his voice high.
‘Uh, Mum?’ Liss said warily. ‘He drank a lot of juice this morning. Like, another whole glass after the one that spilled.’
Jo swerved onto the hard shoulder and slammed on the brakes.
Oscar gasped. ‘A little bit came out!’
‘Out of the car!’ she bellowed, but Adrián was already there, hauling open the door as Dec undid the distracted Oscar’s seatbelt.
He almost made it. When father and son turned back to the car, leaving a wet mark on the concrete barrier at the side of the road, they both looked mortified. Adrián helped Oscar step out of his soiled underwear and they studied his shorts critically.
‘They’ll have to do,’ Adrián said. ‘You tried, mijo,’ he said, roughing up the boy’s hair and propping his arm on his knee to peer into his son’s face. ‘You did really well to hang on as long as you did.’
He pressed a kiss to the top of Oscar’s head and Jo couldn’t help staring. Had she always found it so sexy to watch a man being tender with his kid? And despite Adrián’s prodigious temper, he wasn’t using it on the boy.
‘The seat’s a bit damp,’ he said quietly, appearing at the passenger door. ‘Do you have tissues? We don’t have any towels or anything.’
After he’d settled Oscar on a wad of tissues, taken his own seat and pulled the door closed, Adrián sat back with a sigh. Jo couldn’t help reaching out and giving his arm a squeeze and his hand covered hers immediately. They both looked straight ahead and not at each other and Jo wondered if he too was asking himself how big this thing between them was and what it meant that this madcap car journey felt more right than their doomed attempts to stay away from each other.
Speaking of doom, the clock was ticking. Jo switched the car back on and shoved it into gear. ‘I can look around for a pair of shorts for him while you’re at the police station if you like.’
Adrián paused before answering. ‘He’d probably appreciate it,’ he finally said, clearing his throat.
After reaching the sun-baked, sand-coloured town of endless beach apartments and striped awnings, they got caught briefly in a series of one-way streets and Adrián’s questionable ability to give directions.
‘Turn here – no, not there! Here!’
‘Where is “here”?’ Jo snapped, navigating a traffic island with a sprawling olive tree on it. She turned into a long avenue lined with palms, a view of the beach at the end. After a few more turns, they found the police station and Jo managed to park around the corner, tucking the Corsa in between two other small cars. Oscar hopped out like a shot and Adrián rushed after him.
Once Liss and Dec had unfolded themselves from their cramped seats, they looked expectantly at Jo. ‘Okay, kids,’ she began, ‘first shorts, then ice cream.’
Dec grinned, bumping his shoulder against Jo’s – what counted as affection for her fourteen-year-old and she treasured it. ‘I was hoping you’d say that.’
She turned to Adrián. ‘You’ll give me a call when you’re finished?’
He nodded. ‘I’ll text you if I get an idea of how long it will take. I think Two Hospitals, a Police Station and a Wedding is the name of our film,’ he added with a sigh.
‘It doesn’t have a great ring to it,’ she said wryly, but she was wondering if it sounded like a romcom with a happy ending.
He approached, grasping her arm and leaning close, before he froze and dropped his hand, blinking. He shouldn’t press a kiss to her temple in front of the kids but she wished he had. Instead, he tugged Oscar over, placing his son’s hand carefully into hers and looking between them meaningfully. She gave him a small nod and gripped the little hand tight.
Half an hour later, they were sitting at a chiringuito – a beach bar, and it was Jo’s new favourite word in Spanish – around a white plastic table, with three enormous ice cream sundaes. Jo had been powerless against Oscar’s big dark eyes that had lit up when he’d seen the picture of the one drenched in Smarties and chocolate sauce, with the result that her kids had demanded something equally ostentatious.
In truth, she felt sorry for Oscar, in his weird blue shorts with a crab on the bum, looking a little lost. She’d only ordered a coffee for herself, wondering if Adrián would be finished soon enough to join them. She thought of the other chiringuitos they’d visited together: in Cadaqués and Lloret de Mar. She rather wished Adrián were sitting opposite her right now, framed by the view of the marina with boats bobbing and the golden sand stretching away, the boardwalk dotted with palm trees.
Ice creams devoured, Oscar and Dec headed for the playground – one overflowing with enthusiasm and the other out of sheer boredom. Jo fiddled with her fingernails, remembering the conversation about the manicure. Her nails weren’t nicely shaped – they weren’t even clean that day. So much for wowing the guests at her ex’s wedding.
Not that it mattered. She’d allowed Ben a hold on her pride for too long – or perhaps she’d held onto a false sense of pride for too long. So she was an ex-wife? That designation sometimes came with complications, but life came with complications. In the chaos of the big day, what mattered were these little moments – spent as a family.
Adrián rushed out of the police station with his phone to his ear. Making his statement had of course taken forever, requiring a million signatures and ten thousand copies of his passport and a hundred explanations of why his Spanish identity card had expired.
‘Hello?’ came the answer after Jo’s phone had rung for a long time.
‘Liss? It’s Adrián. I’m finished. Shall I meet you all at the car?’
‘Um, you should probably come down here. Oscar got stuck on the climbing frame and…’
Oh, fuck. ‘Right, okay. I’ll be right there. Can you send me a location pin?’
‘I don’t know Mum’s code. But we’re right on the beach, just down the street from where you were.’
The sight that greeted him when he reached the boardwalk took the wind out of him. At the top of the rope climbing frame hunched Oscar, buffeted by the breeze that had swelled since they’d first arrived in Benicarló. And below, squeezing through the rope honeycomb ten feet off the ground, was Jo…
His breath rushed out and his skin tingled. He’d been smitten before, but this… God, this woman. His insides flipped and churned, devastated by the prospect of a final goodbye tomorrow and stricken with hope that the instant return to their normal that morning meant he might still be able to change her mind about seeing each other when they got back to London.
But no, she was a woman, not a girl whose head could be turned by a bunch of flowers and a love song. Besides, he didn’t have a lot to offer her: bad jokes and a whole lot of baggage. Just himself. As he watched her navigate the climbing frame to reach his kid, he loved the idea of entrusting himself to her.
She could entrust herself to him, too. He knew without doubt that he could treasure her, the woman with the beautiful voice and the meaningless tattoo, the mother, the cynic, the ex-wife.
I see you, Jo.
Oscar cowered in a particularly violent gust of wind and Adrián rushed forward, his copy of the police report whipping out from under his arm. But that would have to wait. Oscar and Jo were up a climbing frame in a dangerous wind and?—
‘Get your hands off the climbing frame, Juan Adrián Rivera Morales!’ Jo bellowed before he’d even closed his fingers around the ropes. ‘I don’t want to make it three hospitals!’
Shading his eyes, he looked up at her. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine!’ she insisted. ‘Oscar is fine. Nobody is afraid of heights.’
He glanced to Liss and Dec, their wide-eyed grimaces suggesting Jo wasn’t quite telling the truth. He gritted his teeth and tensed, ready to jump into action if anything happened.
‘Dec tried to get him down, but he wouldn’t come. He’s been up there for half an hour now,’ Liss explained, coming to stand next to him. He glanced at his watch: one o’clock. They were only fifteen minutes from Pe?íscola, but he couldn’t show up at the wedding in his flip-flops and Oscar couldn’t be a page boy in?—
‘Is that a crab on his bum?’
‘We tried to talk him out of it,’ Liss said, stifling a smile. ‘But he’s named the butt-crab and everything.’
Adrián choked on something between a groan and a hysterical laugh. ‘What did he call it? Pinchy?’
‘Actually, it’s Crabface.’
‘Well, we need to get Oscar down before he falls on his crabface.’
Liss snorted a laugh. ‘Mum will get him down.’
‘I know she will,’ he said softly.
But it was a painstaking process. She had to help him over the first gap with an arm around his waist because his legs were too short. After a few feet of climbing, he nearly fell because his fingers were stiff and raw from clinging to the ropes. She had to hold him and reassure him and coax him down the next few rungs.
A metre from the bottom, Oscar’s confidence suddenly returned and he scrambled down like a monkey, diving into Adrián’s arms. He crouched to squeeze his son tight with his good arm and then hauled him up, the boy’s arms wrapping around his neck.
‘Oye, that was brave, mijito. You scared Papá for a minute.’
‘Going up was okay, but I didn’t know how to get down,’ he sniffed, burying his face in Adrián’s neck.
‘It happens,’ he reassured his son gently. ‘Let’s just check that Jo is all right too.’ Putting Oscar down as smoothly as he could with one arm, he reached up to where Jo was about to make the last jump down, wrapping his arm around her waist to help her.
He could feel the weakness in her, the slight tremor, and he didn’t let go even when her feet hit the sand. His chin against her forehead, he held her as she got her breath back, grateful – so grateful – that she was okay, that he could hold her like this.
‘Thank you,’ he whispered. She tried to shake her head, but he pressed a smacking kiss there, which stopped her quite effectively. ‘Thank you,’ he repeated. Could she tell he meant something different, something more? He wanted to blurt everything out, all his feelings about seeing her at the top of the net: how afraid he’d been, how touched, how it felt like too much, too soon, but there wasn’t anything he could do to stop it. Instead he said, ‘And now,’ drawing back reluctantly because if he started talking, they’d never make it to the wedding, ‘we have to find Mamá and Ben and the church. We might just make it if we hurry.’
Oscar dragged his feet, his brow furrowed, and Adrián was worried for a moment he was going to stubbornly refuse to attend his mother’s wedding. But he took Adrián’s hand and asked, ‘Is Jo going to the wedding? Liss and Dec?’
‘The abuelos too. Everyone will be at the wedding,’ he assured his son.
Oscar nodded gravely. ‘Okay then,’ he said in English. ‘But I’m only going if Crabface can come too.’ Liss and Dec snickered.
‘No one else will be wearing crabfaces,’ Adrián said solemnly.
‘I don’t care. I like these shorts.’
He sighed, stepping up onto the boardwalk as quickly as Oscar could manage. ‘If you have to, mijo.’
‘Right,’ Jo said, tapping her sandals on the edge of the boardwalk to clear the sand. ‘Did you get a copy of the police report for the insurance?’ When he said nothing, she groaned, her fingers rising to her temples and rubbing. ‘You didn’t?’
With a sinking feeling, he remembered the sheets of paper blowing away as he rushed onto the beach in a panic. ‘Shit,’ he muttered.