55. Brave and Free
Roman
It was a rainy Monday morning, and I was in a meeting, working with the marketing team to lay out a presentation that I hoped would put us on one of those solar energy committees Summer had talked about. I was saying, “By next Monday, Gordon,” Gordon was nodding, and Esther was typing on her computer and also, somehow, checking her phone. As I was launching into the next point, Esther stood up, walked around the conference table to me, and waited.
I stopped talking and asked, “Yes?” This had to be disaster. I couldn’t remember the last time Esther had interrupted me like this. She certainly wouldn’t do it for good news.
He who is brave is free. Seneca. You handled disasters in exactly the same way as you handled everything else. One decision at a time.
Esther leaned down and told me quietly, “Summer’s out in Reception. Anne told her you were in a meeting, but she said it was urgent.”
“Right.” I closed my laptop and told the group, “Give me ten minutes.” Told myself the “brave and free” thing again, and added another Seneca quote for good measure. “Cease to hope, and you will cease to fear.” I hadn’t quite mastered that one, unfortunately, because I was both hoping and fearing.
Delilah. It had to be. Either that, or …
There I was, hoping again. Slow learner, I guess. Detachment, that was my brief here.
I headed out to Reception. People looked at me and looked away, because my face was probably too set. Forbidding. When I got out there and saw Summer sitting on a chair, ramrod straight, her purse clutched in her lap with white fingers and so much strain on her drawn face, I got cold all over. Not so brave, not so free, and not one bit detached.
“Summer.” I sank down beside her and put my hand over hers. Hers was cold, and she was nearly shivering, her teeth clamped together. “What happened?”
She turned a blind face to me. “I shouldn’t … be here. Not … not fair. I thought I could handle … but I think I’m having … a panic attack. I think I’m …”
I had my arm around her now, and my other hand on her face. “It’s OK,” I said. “It’s OK. Tell me.”
“I can’t …” She took a shaky breath. “Do you have someplace I can go? There’s the caravan, but there’s Delilah, and I can’t?—”
“Because you can’t scare Delilah,” I said, relieved beyond measure that whatever the problem was, nothing had happened to Delilah. I didn’t think Summer could’ve borne it. “Yeh. There’s a place.” I stood up and told Esther, who was standing nearby as if alerted by radar, “I’m going home. Cancel everything for today. Ping me with anything that can’t wait and can’t be delegated.”
“Everything can wait or be delegated,” she said. “I’ll take care of it. Go.”
Down in the lifts to the carpark, then, and Summer saying, my arm still around her, “Esther’s very good at her job.”
“She is,” I said, heading over to the car. “Tell me now, or wait to get to my house, either one.”
“I need to … wait,” she said. “I need to be … to be …”
“Safe,” I said, and felt the truth of it.
She sat like that, still upright, still rigid, for the five minutes it took to get to the house, then followed me inside. I grabbed the remote and turned up the heat pump, said, “Blankets on the ladder there. Get one,” then knelt at the wood stove and built a quick fire.
When I turned back to her, though, she was still just standing there, clutching her purse. This frozen thing—it scared me. Summer had always kept going, always risen above her fear. Even when she’d been trying to save Delilah from that upside-down van. Even when she’d been stitched in four places and exhausted to her bones, she’d been out there raking that hillside, searching for her gumboots and her wallet so she could clean my car and get out of there. Now, though …
I’d been about to make tea. Instead, I grabbed a blanket from the ladder, pulled Summer down with me onto the couch in front of the fire, wrapped the blanket around her, and held her head against my chest. It was all I could think to do.
For a moment, she still sat rigid. Then she drew in a quick, ragged breath, her shoulders shook, and the sobs came. On and on, shaking in my arms, crying in that way you can tell is physically painful. Crying like she’d held herself together for hours, getting more and more brittle, until finally, she’d shattered.
I’d held her once before like this, when she’d come back from hospital after that girl Erica’s parents had come running and loved their daughter. That one, I’d eventually sussed out. This one, though … I was stumped.
It must have been ten minutes. It felt like an hour. I still didn’t say anything, because I still didn’t know what to say, but finally, the sobs slowed down, and eventually, Summer was shuddering. Shaking. Clutching my shoulder and saying, her voice wobbling all over the shop, “I’m going to have to wash your … your shirt again. It’s?—”
“Bugger my shirt,” I said, although, yeh, I was pretty damp. “Want to tell me first, or clean up?” I was marginally capable of learning from experience, and last time, cleaning up had been high on her list.
“Clean up,” she said, sniffing. No surprise.
“Right, then.” I showed her the bathroom and found her a dressing gown, because when Summer was unhappy or scared, she always seemed cold. Then I changed to a T-shirt, made two cups of tea, dumped a bit of that bourbon into it, as she’d liked it last time, and waited to hear.
I should be angry, maybe, that she’d only come back to me when she was at rock bottom. I couldn’t be. For better or worse, I was glad. Or if I wasn’t …
I was here for her anyway.
Summer
I was saying, “I’m sorry,” for about the tenth time, sipping the hot tea—he’d definitely put bourbon in it—and feeling, for the first time in days, safe.
I knew another person couldn’t make you safe. I felt safe anyway. Maybe it was what Koro had said: that having the right person beside you made life better. Not easy, but better.
Roman said, “Less apologizing and more explaining,” and I had to smile. It was such a Roman thing to say.
I said, “OK. But it’s a lot.”
“You heard me clear my calendar. I have time. Talk.”
“It’s all mixed up together,” I tried to explain. “I can’t even sort it out, so it won’t be organized. I kept thinking, this weekend, that I could handle it, that I could figure it out by myself. I didn’t want to tell Delilah, not until I’d processed it. She’s leaving for the States in a week, and I can’t stand her to think that she has to stay and keep me company. I want her to have her life. That’s what all this has been about. That we can start over and have a life.”
“Still not explaining,” Roman said.
“I’m getting there, OK?” He smiled, which was better, and I went on. “The problem was, I couldn’t process it, not without getting rid of the … the emotion first so I could think it out logically, but I couldn’t face the emotion, and as for talking it out so I could be logical … I couldn’t. There’s so much I have to tell first. Things I can’t … that I can hardly stand even to think about. And I just …” My eyes welled up in spite of myself. It was impossible that I had more tears left. How many could your body even store? Yet here they were. “I just wanted you,” I said. “I’ve been wanting you since I left, and I can’t stop, and I know that’s unfair to you. I know it. You don’t want a needy woman.”
He laughed, which was pretty startling. “Have you been listening to me at all?”
“What?” I stared at him.
“Never mind,” he said. “Sorry for laughing. Go on.”
“OK. Where was I? Oh, wanting you. I wasn’t sure I was ready, though. I did get a job. A software job, and it’s fine. It’s good, in fact, so that’s better. But I wanted you to get a whole person, a healed person—if you still wanted me, of course. Surprise!” I tried to laugh. “You’re not getting that.”
“Oh, I dunno,” he said, back to Roman-calm again. “Don’t you think a whole person includes the messy bits?”
“Oh. Huh.” I tried to consider that, but my fuzzy brain didn’t seem to have the bandwidth. “OK, then. Here goes. My divorce lawyer came to see me on Friday and kind of … dropped a bomb on me.”
“On Friday,” Roman said. “And you’re just here today. Monday.”
“Well,” I pointed out, “I didn’t know where you lived. If you were even in Dunedin. I could have asked Esther, but … Anyway, I kept thinking about it and pushing it away, this whole big … problem, and today—well, I tried to go to work, but when I got there, all I could do was sit. And then I started shaking. I had to get out of there, and my feet sort of … took me to you. I looked up the address for your firm. I was so glad when you came out. You were the only plan I had. It was that or fall apart by myself, or possibly on Daisy, and I really didn’t want to fall apart on Daisy. She’s my landlady, and she’s also extremely competent. She’s the way I used to be.”
“You’re still that way,” Roman said. “You’ve also told me exactly one thing. That your divorce lawyer dropped a bomb. Your UK divorce lawyer? He’s—she’s—in New Zealand? Thought the thing was final. My divorce lawyer doesn’t come by for chats, and he lives here in Dunedin and has done two of them for me.”
“It is final,” I said. “But I guess it can be reopened if there’s new information. Which there is. The thing is—I never thought Felipe had really hidden the money. I thought he’d lost it, like he said, or that his accountant had stolen it, maybe. I could never get a straight answer from him, but if he’d hidden it, why didn’t he just plead guilty and pay? He might still have gone to prison, but not for nearly as long, and he could have kept playing afterwards. He could have kept being a star. Why would you be a prisoner if you could be a star?”
“I’m guessing,” Roman said, “that all this means he did hide the money.”
“Yes,” I said. “He did. Do you know how much?”
“No. How much?”
“One hundred twenty-eight million, seventy-seven thousand, nine hundred fifty-six pounds and ninety-one pence. It’s earned interest.”