Chapter 47
FRASER
‘Who’s in the room?’ Joshua asks me once the piano falls quiet.
How do I answer that? We both look like we’ve seen a ghost. It sounded like Audrey, until it didn’t …
‘It’s got to be Parker,’ he says, matter-of-factly.
Is he jet lagged?
‘How could it be, Josh? She’s thirteen. That was really advanced.’
He stares at me for a second, trying to work out my point. ‘She is really advanced. You’ve heard her! How do you think she got into this gifted program?’
‘She’s in Year Seven. That piece was composed by someone who almost got through her doctorate.’ The less said about that, the better.
‘And the transition into the new section is glorious,’ my brother says. ‘You should be soaring.’
He pushes past me, knocks lightly on the door, then opens it a little, peeks in, and quickly throws it open all the way. ‘Thought I heard my favourite niece!’
She leaps off the piano stool and rushes over to him, throwing her arms around his neck while I compute the exponential development of her talent, and the fact that I’ve missed it.
‘Uncle Josh! I didn’t know you were here yet!’
‘Would I miss a chance to hear you perform?’
I should be soaring.
He’s right. I can’t believe that was Parker playing. The realisation of what my unresolved grief has been pushing away punches me in the gut.
‘Can I play you something?’ she begs her uncle, face shining. She’s always longed for his feedback, ever since he introduced her to the piano when she was tiny. She glances at me. ‘You don’t have to stay, Dad.’
All this time, she’s been making allowances like this while I’ve been extinguishing the stars in her eyes.
It’s been three years of turning music off, of hitting mute and leaving rooms. Three years of jogging only to podcasts and audiobooks, of driving listening to talk-back radio, and of leaving events before the DJ kicks off.
Three years of Parker, can you play that somewhere else?
Of buying two concert tickets, psyching myself up to go, and then giving the other one to Maggie.
As my brother stands close to the piano and she double-checks he’s listening, I realise it’s been three years of missing out not just on music.
Missing out on Parker. Time that I’ve lost sharing the one thing she loves more than anything else in the world and, worse, the outlet she’s used to bring herself through the loss of her stepmum.
Josh catches me floundering. I thought I’d done so well. I manage my mental health like a pro. I take the medication. I go to counselling. Why can’t I handle this? The sight of my gifted daughter in her element.
Just as I’m about to walk out, he pulls me beside him while she plays, throwing his arm around me the way he used to do when we were boys and I fell off the equipment at the playground, or I was tormented by the neighbourhood bullies.
After years of frostiness between us, this touch of humanity hits almost as hard as the notes she’s playing.
This music sounds like Audrey. It sounds like everything I’ve missed with Parker. It sounds like bad parenting and cowardice and makes it desperately clear that unless I can conquer this grief, I’m going to lose my daughter, too.
‘I am shutting out my own child,’ I admit to Josh once Parker has packed up and gone to a tutorial. ‘Denying the part of her that connects her to Audrey, because they were kindred spirits on this.’
He knows that feeling. I wait for him to remind me he was Audrey’s kindred spirit first.
‘Give yourself a break,’ he says, instead. ‘You’re parenting through a horrible situation, and look at her. She is a fantastic, talented kid. You know, I’m envious of you. You got the family I always wanted.’
Has he been paying attention?
I glare at him. ‘You’re aware my first marriage ended in divorce and the second in death? What can you possibly find to envy here?’
‘Apart from your amazing kid?’
‘Apart from that.’
He looks at me closely. Vulnerably, actually.
We haven’t had a conversation like this in so long I can’t remember the last one.
Maybe never. ‘I’ve only been properly in love once,’ he admits.
‘It all went wrong and hurt so badly, I never allowed myself to get that close to a woman again. You think I’m happy in New York?
You see me connected with singers and actresses and Broadway stars—’
I actually don’t keep up with the New York social scene or his apparently leading role in it, but that’s not the point.
‘I’ve never been more lonely.’ He checks how I’m taking all of this and adds, ‘You know I lost her twice.’
I’m not getting into an argument with Josh about Audrey and which one of us hurts more.
‘It all goes wrong for you, and you go back for more. You’re a fucking romantic, Fraser. I bet you’re still capable of falling in love, even after the worst has happened, third time around. You’ve gone through all of this, and you’ll still end up married fifty years.’
That jolts me. ‘That’s what I promised Audrey. Fifty years.’
For the first time since her death, a revised timeline presents itself. No. Not revised, exactly. The same timeline. Revised expectations. Maybe my time with Audrey, which had felt so bright and promising, was always intended to be just this short, dazzling slice.
‘You didn’t get fifty years with her,’ Josh is saying. ‘But you still could. With someone else …’
I loathe everything happens for a reason. I loathe God’s will and she’s at peace now. The people who speak like that have never had to donate an unworn wedding dress to a charity shop.
Of course it was Rachael who helped me do that, too.
She helped me with everything, starting at the end, at sunset the night Audrey died.
Breaking the news to her sister. Cancelling the wedding.
Arranging the funeral and then being around, every step of the way, with Parker, who just days ago asked her to get in the car and drive to us at the beach, the way I know she’d drive to us anywhere.
She has become the hygge in our lives. The cosiness.
The comfort. Against the ‘overhead lights’, Rachael is our candlelight.
The more I put this together, the faster my heart beats. This is the woman with whom Parker and I have formed a placeholder family. The one who has been there from the very beginning, who can’t wait around for everything else to fall into place.
And now I have taken her for granted for so long, she has scrambled together an international escape plan and is leaving. While I do what? Fling open the door and usher her through?
I look at my brother. A man who so often gets romance wrong.
Someone who has famously blundered through a string of consecutive dalliances that have left him with nobody to share his gleaming life at the top.
Yet somehow he has seen straight through me.
And he is absolutely clear. Despite the shuddering loss I’ve experienced—or maybe because of it—we could have fifty years …