Chapter 25
AUDREY
When my friends and I crash through the door at home, I fling off the worst day of my life: keys, handbag, shoes, earrings … and stride to our bedroom. I rip apart my shirt, buttons flung to all corners as I barge into the bathroom, flicking the shower tap.
I toss the shirt in the bin. I can’t ever wear it again.
It’s the shirt Fraser complimented me on as he left the house this morning.
The last shirt he saw me wearing. The shirt I wore as he took his final breath.
My clothes are strangling me. I tear everything off, needing to be naked with my grief, and toss it all in a pile.
I want to set fire to it, a bonfire of trauma that will spread and burn my whole life to the ground.
In the shower, the water attacks my sensitive skin the way it does when you’re feverish.
My pain receptors are screaming. But I’m not sick.
A thunderstorm of anguish has me weeping at first, my tears barely discernible from the hot water dripping onto my face, until I crash against the shower tiles, sobbing.
How could Fraser—kind, funny, loving, vital Fraser, who was so alive this morning—possibly not be coming home tonight? Or any night, ever again. Fraser, with whom I had intended to see out the rest of my life. How can he just not exist?
I’m shaking now. It’s not shock. It’s fear. Because the idea of struggling through this without him is inconceivable. I need him here to help me through losing him … I must be losing my mind as well.
‘Audrey?’ It’s Jess, calling from just outside the bathroom. ‘You okay in there?’
‘Yes,’ I call back, voice cracking. There’s something terribly isolating about the shower.
I shut off the tap and reach for a towel.
Drying myself feels like an exhausting ordeal, as if every ounce of my energy is already accounted for, absorbed in the hideous task of processing exactly what has happened.
‘Here,’ she says, passing an enormous glass of white wine through a crack in the bathroom door.
Surely I can make it through the shower without alcohol?
Nonetheless, I take the glass from her since she’s gone to the trouble of carrying it upstairs.
I swallow three large mouthfuls, set it down on the vanity, and stare at myself in the mirror, steam swirling around me like it’s my spirit, escaped from my body, refusing to reenter somewhere so dangerous and unstable.
Threatening to join him? God, it’s as if I’m already drunk!
On the vanity, beside my toothbrush and his, is a smaller purple one.
At the sight of it, the heart-wrenching loss I’ve been wrestling lights a spot fire that ignites a far more serious blaze.
Parker, the stepchild I love so acutely, has lost her father.
Rachael had called Maggie, who’d suggested we give Parker one more sleep before breaking this to her.
I imagine Fraser, wherever he is, trying desperately to reach us and help.
Circling us. Going to Parker first, as he should.
That’s his job as a father: to protect his baby.
It must be killing him that he can’t. Killing him, though he is already dead—what a nonsensical thought.
I gulp more wine. And more. Veins already tingling with the alcohol as it tries valiantly to ease the unsoothable.
What if I lose contact with Parker? What if circumstances change and Maggie moves her away?
Maggie and Fraser agreed that neither would take jobs in other cities until Parker was at least eighteen, even though both parents’ professional skills were so eminently transferable.
But now Maggie is free. What legal rights will I have? Any?
I take another sip, rack my brain, and think back to the custody battles we used to handle at the firm. Had I known I’d need this information in the future, after I’d fallen for, almost married, and lost the client I was flirting with over penguins, perhaps I’d have paid more attention.
Draining the glass alarmingly quickly, I pull on pyjamas, brush past the wedding dress I can’t look at on a hanger in the doorway, and pad downstairs to face the others, head spinning.
My friends are crowded around the kitchen bench in a worried huddle, having some sort of emergency congress in hushed tones.
They stop talking when I appear in the doorway, empty glass in hand.
Clair flicks on the kettle.
I glance at the wine bottle, and April, reading my mind, twists the screw top and splashes liquid liberally into the glass, as if placating me this way has been medically ordered.
Not enough grapes exist to make the gallons of wine required to anaesthetise this crisis. We migrate to the living room and Clair, already in all black, with matching long black hair and a red streak, plonks the bottle on the coffee table while we let the situation simmer in stunned silence.
‘Right. We’re going to help you through every step of this,’ April declares, pushing up her sleeves, ready to start work on my calamity, reiterating the catchphrase they laid out in the hospital foyer. Rach nods but can’t seem to trust herself to speak.
‘This cataclysm will be conquered by your friendship circle plus tea and chocolate and sauvignon blanc,’ Clair says, as if it is remotely possible to scale it using any of these items.
‘I can’t just drink this away,’ I argue, weakly, taking another sip, as Rach places a large glass of water in front of me.
‘I don’t think that’s how it works.’ I wish it were.
It would be so much easier if I could just be sloshed for the foreseeable …
if I could let a torrent of alcohol carry me through this, surfing the pain right through to the end, wherever I wash up.
I’ve only ever drunk out of want. Not need.
‘I should stop here, before I end up in rehab …’
‘Don’t be so dramatic, Auds! You’ve had two glasses. Not two bottles!’ Jess says.
I feel like I could easily polish off two bottles. The two glasses, mixed with trauma and grief, appear to have set off some new chemical reaction in my brain.
Surely it’s okay to numb this agony just for one night? Tomorrow, I will attack grief with exercise and early nights and mindfulness and sufficient hydration. Maybe I’ll do this so well, I’ll be the poster girl for healthy grieving.
I have to be.
Or I suspect losing Fraser is going to kill me.
It’s probably an hour and a half later when I realise, in horror, that Rachael told Maggie I would call Fraser’s family.
It would have been a helpful promise to have remembered before the shock really hit and we ran out of wine and April switched us to Baileys.
I should have accepted Maggie’s offer to do it. They love her.
I am in no state to arrive on their doorstep, so I call his parents’ landline. I don’t know anyone else who still has one. In any case, it rings out several times before I quit. Relieved. I can face them tomorrow.
‘I don’t want to do this,’ I mumble. My friends think I’m talking about doing my life without Fraser, so there’s a fresh and enthusiastic round of You won’t be alone, we’ll be beside you, Audrey. But really it’s that I’m texting Josh.
Can you come over? It’s impotent.
The message whooshes off. ‘Fuck! I wrote “impotent”!’ I say, through blurred vision.
‘Who’s impotent?’ April inquires, pouring more liquid into her glass.
‘Josh.’
‘Josh is impotent?’ Jess repeats, heartily. ‘That explains a lot—’
‘No, it’s autocorrect. God!’
I-m-p-o-r-t-a-n-t.
He’s seen the message. No response. I can’t just text straight out that his brother died. But he’s not going to reply unless I drop some sort of attention-grabbing bombshell:
It’s about Fraser.
Still nothing.
The wedding is off.
‘You know, if Josh hadn’t done what he did, you wouldn’t have been on that Zoom and missed those calls, and you’d have arrived at the school before Fraser and he would still be alive, so really it’s all Josh’s fault,’ Clair rambles—an observation I’m sure she’ll regret voicing aloud in the morning.
In my intoxicated state, I don’t want to start piecing together whose fault this is, particularly as somewhere in the spinning inside my brain is an awful thought that Clair’s logic could equally apply to me, somehow. If I’d fixed this years ago …
‘It’s the butterfly effect,’ I mumble instead. ‘Eternalism?’
They look at me blankly.
‘You know, all time exists now? Fraser’ll explain it—’
My sentence backfires, the explosion firing straight in the heart. Fraser won’t be explaining anything. How is it possible I have forgotten that he is gone, right in the middle of a conversation about his death?
‘I think I’m having a nervous breakdown,’ I admit. Rach comes and sits beside me, arm around my shoulders, and takes the glass from my hand.
‘It’s not that,’ she assures me. ‘It’s shock. And wine. And cream liqueur, unfortunately. You’re going to be so unwell tomorrow, I’m afraid.’
By the time Joshua arrives, I am barely able to stagger to the door. I fling it open and there he is, in jeans and a leather jacket, an older, edgier version of his brother, looking the opposite of impotent, and now I’m in tears at the resemblance.
‘What did Fraser do?’ he asks, his temper frayed. ‘Where is he?’
‘He didn’t do anything.’ I didn’t expect him to be so angry.
‘Why is the wedding off? You having second thoughts, Sully?’ He looks at me more closely. ‘Are you … hammered?’
It might be the alcohol, but as he shifts his weight and crosses his arms, I imagine a glimmer of hope flashing in his dark eyes.
‘I have to tell you something, Josh. It’s not good.’ Understatement of the year.
His fixed stare penetrates my skin the way it always did. I’m hot and flustered and exceedingly nauseous all of a sudden because this is a million times harder than the last time I sat him down for a confessional.
Clair’s argument spins around my head like I’m on the Gravitron. If Josh hadn’t done what he did … It’s all his fault …
‘It’s all your fault!’ I accuse him, and he flinches. ‘I missed a phone call that meant Fraser had to leave work to pick up Parker instead, and some distracted parent in a four-wheel drive swung across the pedestrian crossing without looking and—’
I can’t say it. I don’t have to, judging by the expression on his face and the way he’s unfurling his crossed arms, drawing me across the threshold outside, and holding my hair back while I hurl into the front garden. A minute passes while I pull myself together, rage bubbling up.
‘You helped Ridges steal my music! There were others, Josh, and while I was meeting with them earlier today, I missed the call.’
Somehow, despite my shock and grief and drunkenness and the compound anger of many years, I realise I’ve just told Josh his brother died and his career might crash, all at once.
I throw up again and, when I’m done and he’s passed me his handkerchief, he pulls me gently to his chest—a place I do not want to be.
His firm hand supports the back of my dizzy head while I focus on his heartbeat as it thuds through his shirt.
It stirs vague memories of wild university parties, and how he was there for me like this before.
I hate this. And need it. And desperately wish Fraser were holding me.
‘Sully,’ Josh whispers after an eternity. ‘I’m so incredibly sorry. About everything.’