24
The flight to New York feels a hundred years long. Just two days ago I was so excited for this moment – when I’d be heading back to Sara, to New York. To my life. But now it feels wrong, heavy. The prospect of my empty apartment makes me want to cry.
As the flight progresses, I feel worse. Right now, squashed between two kind elderly women in my economy seat, I feel more alone than I ever have – I miss Sara, I miss my mum, who I still haven’t called about her wedding. And – now the truth has risen to the surface, the realisation seems inevitable: I miss Jack. I miss seeing him every morning, I miss watching him talk to booksellers and sign books and give interviews on television and make speeches at events. I even miss telling him to get lost – hating him was the most alive I’ve felt in a long time. But what’s done is done. All I can do is get back to New York and face the consequences. I take a deep breath, pull my sleeping mask over my eyes, and allow myself to sink into the darkness. As the plane grows closer to its destination, my dad’s face flickers into my mind, gradually fading as I drift slowly off to sleep.
I head into the office the next day, jet-lagged but ready to face the music.
Jessica reacts normally when I arrive, greeting me with a smile and asking me how the trip was. Slightly startled at her lack of reaction to my early return, I reply with ‘fine’, and sit down at my desk. As I do, she leans over and asks if I have a few minutes to step into her office. My stomach drops. Here we go.
‘I received a call from Jack this morning,’ she says once we’ve sat down and she’s closed the door, her expression neutral. What little strength I had left drains out of me. Oh God. What did he say to her?
‘He explained what happened on the trip,’ she says, and as she does she reaches out her arm to touch mine. ‘I’m so sorry, Andie.’ Her expression is sympathetic. ‘We had no indication that he’d be a difficult author to work with. Our non-fiction team only had lovely things to say about him.’
I don’t say speak for a few moments, shocked into silence. ‘What do you mean?’ I say, when I eventually find my voice again.
‘You don’t have to protect him, Andie,’ she says, crossing her arms. ‘He told me what happened: that he was so stressed about the book being a success he made your life hell on the trip, and that it got so bad he had a change of heart and told you to go home early.’
My heart twists. He’s trying to help me. But this time, I can’t let him.
‘That’s not true,’ I say, a new resolve moving through me. I can’t let him take the fall for this. I feel tears threatening, but I take a breath and hold them back. ‘Jack and I have a personal history,’ I say, looking straight at Jessica. ‘We knew each other at university, and some – some things happened between us, which I didn’t want to disclose, so I lied by omission and didn’t say anything. But if anyone was making anyone else’s life hell, it was me.’ By this point, the tears are dangerously close, but I need to carry on or I won’t be able to finish. ‘I’m sorry, Jessica. I let you down, and I let the company down, and I jeopardised a really important campaign. I’ll—’ I pause, taking a short, rattling breath. ‘—I’ll see myself out.’
I get up out of my seat and move to start walking towards the door, but she puts an arm on mine and stops me. ‘Wait, Andie. Sit.’ Her voice is sterner than I’ve heard it since I started this job, so I obey, and I sit back down.
‘Firstly, I have to disagree with you. I don’t know what happened between you and Jack, but from my perspective you have done a brilliant job on his campaign. The coverage you secured was excellent, and all the feedback I’ve had is that the trip went very smoothly. I even had an email from Declan in Ireland saying how fantastic you were.’
I am just about hearing what she’s saying, but my heart is beating so fast it’s difficult to concentrate.
‘Secondly, Jack himself told us how excellent you were, and implied that if we fired you he’d never write another book for us. Personal history or not, no author who has had his campaign ruined would be speaking about you like that. Trust me.’
This hits like another punch to the gut. Keep it together, Andie .
‘What I want to know,’ Jessica says, ‘is do you want to keep working with us?’
I wasn’t expecting this, and it floors me. I don’t feel like I deserve to think about that right now. But Jessica keeps looking at me, expectant, so I take a breath, trying to shut out the negative thoughts and consider what she’s saying.
On the one hand, I know there’s some truth to what she’s just said: I did put a good campaign together for Jack, and I ran the tour as smoothly as I could with respect to the external circumstances. I suppose, if you step back and remove some of the times I told him to get fucked, I objectively did an OK job. On the other hand, I slept with an author on a book tour, and crossed several other serious professional lines. Regardless of everything that followed, regardless even of the past between us, I can’t help but feel that my overall impact on the tour – on Jack – was a negative one. I should have been honest from the start, but now it’s too late.
With the risk of running into Jack again, I’m not sure I can countenance staying in this job. And, if I’m truly honest with myself, I’m now not sure that I want to. I need some space to put myself back together, to figure out what it is that I actually want. Because I’m no longer sure that it’s this: this job, this life. I’m not sure of anything, anymore.
‘I really appreciate your faith in me, Jessica,’ I say, and her expression turns hopeful, as if she’s expecting me to say I want to stay. I take a deep breath. ‘But I think it’s better for me, and for the company, if I hand in my notice.’
‘Are you absolutely sure?’ she says. ‘If you feel comfortable disclosing what happened, I’m sure we could work something out. It really may not be as bad as you think.’
‘I think this is the right thing to do,’ I say, resolve moving through me.
She looks disappointed but nods. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘I can’t say I agree with your choice, but I respect your decision,’ she says. ‘And for what it’s worth, I’m very sorry to lose you.’
I take a breath as I leave the room, looking around the office that just a month ago was the culmination of so much hard work. The dream of an Andie who was sure beyond anything that this would fix all her problems, would finally make her feel that she’d arrived at her destination. That she could stop running. But – as I found out in spades – it was never going to be enough. I can see that now. I just wish I’d realised a few weeks ago, and saved Jack from being caught up in it all.
I’m surprised by the calm I feel. My lease is up in a couple of months, and I have enough money to last me until then. After that I’ll have to figure things out. But the desperate financial anxiety that has been following me around since Sara moved out is suddenly absent. I know that this is the right thing to do, and that’s more important than anything else right now.
I pick up my stuff from my desk – nothing more than a few pens and a photo of me, my mum and my dad. I’m so used to its presence that I barely look at it anymore. But, once I’m in the elevator, I reach in and pull it out of the box. We’re on the street where my dad had his yoga studio. I stand in the centre of the frame, looking miserable, while my dad beams beside me and my mum leans against the wall on my right. I was fifteen, and I’d just had my hair cut. My dad kept insisting it was beautiful, though I wasn’t convinced: it was too short and choppy. I’d gotten the inspiration from a picture in a magazine, but when I saw it on myself I hated it. I’d been crying all morning. After some gentle coaxing, my dad had persuaded me to leave the house to go down the road for a coffee. On the way home, he grabbed my mum and I and stopped someone on the street to take a photograph of us. I remember protesting, embarrassed about the state of my hair, then eventually relenting when I saw how much he wanted it. It was only after the photo was taken that he turned us both around and told us we were standing outside his new yoga studio.
When I’ve looked back on that memory since I’ve felt a huge weight of guilt: I made the morning about me, when he clearly had huge news he wanted to share with us.
The thing no one ever tells you about losing someone you love is how guilty you’ll feel about every single moment you spent with them where you could’ve been more attentive, more loving. Where you would’ve soaked up more of their presence, if you’d known you’d lose them so soon. But now, when I look at this photo which has served as a symbol of my guilt for so long, I remember the warmth of his arms around us. I remember my mum, who’d been sceptical of his idea to open a studio, wiping away tears of happiness for him. I remember feeling loved. Whole.
Before I am aware of what’s happening, I’m crying, the tears I held in in that car park with Jack finally coming loose. It feels right, to hurt. To feel this loss, without pushing it aside.
I’m barely aware of my surroundings as I step out of the elevator. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t have a job. And there’s so much still to fix: with Sara, with my mum. But right now, I’m not thinking about that. I step out onto the street, the heat of the New York air hitting my face, and I feel like I’m seeing the city for the first time. My dad is gone, I think to myself, the truth of the words settling around me. And that’s a truth I will, perhaps, carry around for the rest of my life, facing it in moments where I least expect it: when I pass a yoga studio, or see a shirt in his favourite shade of blue. When I watch my mum marry someone new, or visit the home I grew up in. When I allow myself to think about him, rather than pushing the thought away, leaning in to the memories of his hand in mine, us buying piles of books in local bookshops, him teaching me how to swim. Us in our family home, laughing with mum. They’re all there, waiting, whenever I need them. And thinking about them, thinking about him, will hurt, forever, in increments. Sometimes small twinges, sometimes waves that almost knock me off my feet. But in this moment, the New York pavement underfoot, my breath coming slow and deep, a stillness coming over me as the city moves around me, everyone surging forwards into their lives, it hits me, for the first time, that maybe that’s OK.
As soon as I get back to my flat, I pick up my phone and call my mum. She answers after two rings. ‘Andie!’ she practically sings, and the tears start falling again at the sound of her voice. She deserves better than what she’s had for the last few weeks, the last few years.
‘I’m so sorry, Mum,’ I say, feeling suddenly and all at once how stupid I’ve been, to be so scared of this.
‘For what, sweetheart?’
And then it all spills out: the guilt I’ve been holding on to for the last four years, increasing with each day we’ve been apart. That I never moved back after the graduate scheme. That I haven’t talked to her properly about Dad since I moved away. That I don’t call her enough. That I feel like a failure of a daughter, like I’m constantly letting her down. That all these years I’ve been making an island of myself, when I should have been holding her closer. And as I’m talking it becomes clearer by the second: the problem was never New York. It was me. I put the distance between us, not my job. Not even living on a different continent. I’ve been using it as an excuse to avoid my feelings, all this time. Pushing my mum away instead of letting her in. Building a prison of my grief rather than allowing her to share in it. She listens, patient and kind as always, and even her silence makes me want to cry. ‘The truth is—’ I pause, willing myself to get the words out, to do this properly. ‘I’ve been all tangled up in my feelings about Dad. And I didn’t know how to talk about it without falling apart. Every time I come home, every time we talk about him, it hurts so much I can’t breathe. And then I met Nigel, and it all came up again, and I—’ I pause, trailing off, finding I’ve run out of words. In the next beat of silence my body comes alive with fear, waiting for her response. Waiting for her to confirm what I’ve been afraid of this whole time: that I’m a terrible daughter, and I’ve messed everything up irrevocably.
‘Oh, sweetheart, it’s OK,’ she says, gently, her tone a little more serious now, and the tension starts to seep out of me. ‘Nigel has been very patient with me, very kind. But Lord knows it hasn’t been smooth sailing for me either. It’s been wonderful, and sometimes difficult, and sometimes sad.’ She takes a breath, and when she speaks again there’s resolve in her tone. ‘I’ve found, though, in my years on this earth, that life will surprise you. There is never just one thing at a time. There’s room for many things, always. Light and dark, all at once.’
The truth of her words sinks into me as she says them, and I sit with them for a moment, feeling her presence through the phone. I take a breath.
‘Now, secondly,’ she continues. ‘And I need you to really listen to me here. You know, of course you do – in those first six months after your father died, it was all I could do just to keep it together. And you were wonderful, and you helped me so much. But I wanted you to take that job. Nothing made me prouder than seeing you get on that plane. It was so brave, like you were seizing life with both hands, even after everything we’ve lost. It made me feel more brave, too. So don’t you for one second feel sorry for living your life. We’ve all just been doing our best, in the face of a horrible loss.’ She pauses, waiting for her words to sink in. I let out a long breath when she’s finished, like her words have released me from the fortress I’ve shut myself in over the last four years. I feel lighter, like a huge weight has been lifted from me, and I can breathe, again.
‘I miss him,’ I say, the tears starting, now.
‘Oh, love,’ she says. ‘I miss him, too, every day.’
‘Do you remember that day at school in Year 9 where we had to wear pink?’ I ask, suddely alive with a memory that’s rushed to the surface, with the desire to share it with her.
She goes quiet for a moment, thinking. ‘Yes,’ she says, eventually. ‘You didn’t have anything to wear – you were in your rebellious phase, wearing black all the time – and you were so worried about it, bless you.’
‘Do you remember what happened?’ I ask.
‘Your father—’ Her tone is gentle, as if she’s treading carefully. I wait, and after a moment of silence, she continues, tentatively. ‘He went out to buy you a T-shirt while you were at school, to surprise you, but bless his heart he had no idea which one to get you.’
I smile through my tears in anticipation of what comes next. ‘Then what?’ I ask.
‘Well,’ she says, and I can hear that she’s choked up, now. ‘He bought you fourteen shirts, the silly man, and put them all out on your bed for when you got home.’
I laugh, even as my eyes fill with tears, even as my chest contracts with the pain of loss. A great hole opens in the defences I’ve been putting up, and the grief flows out, a steady stream, breaking down some of the walls. ‘There were so many shirts, Mum,’ I say, and then she’s laughing, too, and we’re both hysterical, the sound of her laughter a comfort as tears pour down my face.
‘I love you,’ I say, my throat thick.
‘I love you too, my Andie,’ she says. ‘And so does he. He loved you more than anything.’
This is it: the last frontier, the last part of the wall crumbling down entirely with her words, the reassurance I didn’t know I needed to hear. And then without even stopping to think about it, I take a deep breath, and tell her everything. What happened in Edinburgh, what’s happened since. Everything I’ve felt in the last five years that I haven’t told her about, for fear it would be too much, too difficult, spills out of me like a river, flowing freely from the dam that has now burst completely. She listens, again, patiently, silently, waiting for me to finish.
‘Everything’s such a mess, I don’t know what to do,’ I say, tears now streaming down my face at the years of emotion I’ve just released, the overwhelm that I’ve finally been honest, finally let her in, and that everything hasn’t blown up as I expected it to. I’m still here, and the apartment building is still standing, and my mum is still on the other side of the phone. Like she always has been. Like she always wanted to be.
A wave of grief hits me for the years I’ve lost to all this pain, the years we could have spent growing closer rather than drifting apart. And in the next second it comes to me. The lost time I want to make up for with her. The wedding and everything that will come with it. ‘Mum,’ I say, my voice small, nerves suddenly taking hold. ‘Can I come and stay for a while? Maybe—’ I take a breath, holding the phone closer to my ear, ‘Maybe I can help with the wedding planning, and spend some time with Nigel.’
She doesn’t respond immediately, and for a split second I’m worried I might have misjudged how welcome I’ll be, especially when she has a wedding to plan. I might be more of a burden than a help. But then she sighs, as if these are the words she’s been waiting for me to say for the last five years, and says, ‘I cannot tell you how special that would be for me. My Andie, back home. When can you come? I’ll have to start buying all your favourite foods—’
By the time we get off the phone, I’ve booked a flight for a few days’ time and, despite my protests, she’s made a shopping list which is probably about three pages long. Maybe my return home isn’t going to be as selfless as I hoped, but maybe that’s OK. Maybe, after all this time, I can finally let her look after me, too.