Chapter 50
AUDREY
‘Audrey?’ A voice squeals in the corridor as I lock the rehearsal room after a second productive morning of writing alone. ‘AUDREY!’
A cyclonic teenager slams into my body, pushing me into the wall, making me drop everything. My heart bursts as I squeeze Parker to my chest, then push her to arm’s length to take her in. ‘Look at you, Parks! You look incredible!’
How am I staring at her at eye level? When did that happen? I’m sick with how much I’ve missed of her life and just want to drink in every inch of her.
‘Mum hates this whole fit.’ She shows it off proudly. Black jeans. At least three layered tops. Combat boots. ‘I knew you’d love it.’
It’s been far too long. Months, since we’ve seen each other. The secondary loss of this child from my life guts me every single day. I doubt there is any number of years of sobriety that Maggie would accept as sufficient to allow me back into her life again, unleashed.
I glance over her shoulder. Her uncle is waiting for her in the foyer, watching from the respectable distance I commanded yesterday, hands in pockets, frown on face.
‘Mum doesn’t understand my life at all,’ Parker is already confiding. ‘Not any of it. Not you. Not … other things.’
We really can’t be having this conversation. We’re not meant to be unsupervised, let alone having an open rant about Maggie.
She takes out her phone and makes a call. My precious piece of Fraser. My connection to him, in human form. She is his DNA. His blood. Had he and I changed our minds and had a baby, she would have been my child’s sibling—
‘Mum? Can Audrey come to lunch if Uncle Josh is there?’
It’s like being shocked by a defibrillator.
‘Parker!’ I move in close and talk into the phone: ‘Maggie, sorry! We just bumped into each other. I’m not involved! I can’t really—’
She ends the call and squeals. ‘She said it’s fine!’
But it’s not fine! I wish Beau was still here—he would have been a good excuse—but he disappeared to work on his script. And to give you time to think, he said, about risking this level of exposure.
‘Uncle Josh!’ She runs down the corridor, and I can tell the precise moment she breaks the news, because he looks as impressed as I feel. Hardly surprising after I sent him packing yesterday.
I pick up the papers and the bag that I dropped and walk towards them, equal parts repelled and enthused.
‘Mum said it’s okay if Audrey comes, because you’re here,’ she says to Josh, as if the whole family is fully abreast of the circumstances of my excommunication.
‘Why wouldn’t it be okay?’ he asks, brows knitted. Perhaps Maggie did keep her promise.
‘Long story,’ I answer. This is excruciating. ‘I don’t think we need to get into it now, Parker. Where shall we eat?’
The one thing about having lunch with a thirteen-year-old is that you don’t have to talk.
We’re at a sushi place near the university, and it’s enormously overstimulating—the array of food choices, the loud music, the lunchtime rush, Parker’s excited prattle, the constantly moving conveyer belt. Josh.
He’s the anchor here. The only thing not moving. The thing I would focus on to get my bearings, like when you’re in a car and they say to pick a point on the horizon, except traditionally when I focus on this man, my life falls apart.
He seems to have no such problem in reverse. I can feel his steady attention while I wrangle sushi and mineral water and Parker’s peppered anecdotes and questions, with which I can barely keep up.
‘… And then I came out to Mum and she freaked. Hey, Audrey, when do you think Taylor will drop her next album? There was a rogue letter M in one of her Instagram posts. Like, right amongst all the emojis and stuff. Do you think that was a typo, or is it code for March?’
Josh and I exchange a glance. Did she just say she came out?
Emotion I can barely label floods my body. My face prickles with heat, and with a tremendous sense of having been absent during something so crucial. With Fraser absent, too. And Maggie freaked? Maggie, who is not only a loving mother but a trained and experienced psychiatrist.
‘I don’t understand,’ I say.
‘About the emojis?’
‘No, I get the Swiftie fan theories. It could mean May, couldn’t it?’
The idea of my not being available to back her up with this just kills me. I am furious. At myself, and at what I did that caused her mum to enact this forced rift between us.
‘I also told her I asked my friends to call me Bee, not Parker. She lost it! We had a huge fight—’
Words from the past echo in my head. Fraser, why can’t Audrey call our child by her proper name?
‘Then I stormed out and blocked her and stayed at a friend’s place that night.’
What’s with her insistence on ‘Bee’? We named her Parker.
‘So basically I hate her.’
I wasn’t meant to hear that conversation, years ago. I’d come downstairs as they were saying goodbye in the hall. Maggie, they adore each other, Fraser said softly. It’s just a name she made up because Parker is always buzzing around. Parker loves it. Let them have this one thing …
One thing? Maggie said. They’ve got music. And for Parker, that’s everything!
I look at Parker now and realise there could be a major gap in background information here. I’m sure Maggie could have handled this better, but I very much doubt her response was driven by what Parker assumes.
‘Could your mum’s response be more about your choice of name?’ I ask. More about me, in other words.
‘But that’s been your nickname for me for years! You even called me that at Uncle Josh’s concert, when I met you!’ She looks at me, then puts her sushi down, understanding beginning to dawn.
‘Sometimes we get things wrong, as adults,’ I explain, from bitter experience. I don’t want to get into this in front of Josh, but who knows when I’ll be allowed to see her again. ‘You know how much I messed up. I was responsible for you and I botched it. Badly.’
I try to forget he’s here. I will not look at him.
‘Mum had a choice in how to act. You didn’t. Addiction is a mental health condition,’ she says, all progressive teen enlightenment and understanding. ‘It’s a disease.’
Right, so it’s all on the table now.
‘And you know who helped me through that?’ I ask her.
Silence.
‘No, you don’t, because she never made a big deal of it. Your mum took me to the doctor. She arranged my first prescription, because I was too self-conscious to enter the pharmacy and ask. She helped me clean up the house. She checked in. She brought meals. She kept my privacy.’
I flick a glance at Josh. He is gobsmacked.
‘She wouldn’t let me see you!’ Parker protests, but her tone has lost some of its sting.
‘Because she loves you. I bet it’s killing her that she’s let you down.’
She twists a lock of her hair. It’s cropped short with an undercut.
‘I love it like this!’ I say, admiring it.
‘You look different, too, Audrey. Do you have a secret boyfriend?’
The question gives me whiplash. I am not opening up about Beau in present company. The idea of even mentioning his name makes my nerve endings vibrate with alarm. And with something else. And with everything.
Beau was right. I am madly in love with Fraser.
I always will be. But as for the rest of what he said—that I was strong and creative and talented and …
flammable, even the way I appeared on Night One, like a dangerous swamp monster, wielding my vehicle against his—my whole body tingles at the thought …
‘She does,’ Josh says, breaking into my thoughts, reading me right the way he always did.
‘Who is it?’ Parker asks, leaning towards me.
‘It’s nobody,’ I answer, frowning at them both. ‘I’ve started composing again. That’s why I’m here. To spend a few days writing music.’
Her eyes are alight. ‘You can do it, Audrey! You can! You two are the whole reason I love music.’
She holds out both her hands, palms up, inviting us each to take one. But the poignancy of the gesture is short-lived. As Josh and I reach for her, we seem to notice in unison the mirrored crisscrosses of raw red skin inside each of her wrists.
She sees her mistake instantly, lets us go, and tugs at her sleeves. And my heart cracks all over again.
‘Parker, does your mum know about that?’ I ask, gently, fragments coming to mind of her wearing long sleeves in summer, tugging at the cuffs, and that sense I’d had for so long that something was up.
‘Please don’t tell her.’ She’s frantic now, her secret exposed.
All this time, I’ve been worried sick about the example I set.
I’ve been so hard on myself for letting her down, and letting Fraser down, posthumously.
He once explained, after we’d all had a particularly difficult day at home, that parenting was a constant exercise in trying to adjust our own warped perspective.
We magnify our mistakes. We focus on the times we get it wrong, and never on the string of little triumphs that add up to a good job over a lifetime.
But what if one mistake is so huge, we’re cut from a child’s life? How can I ever forgive that?
When I look at Josh, his eyes are glistening. Whatever else he’s done wrong, there’s purity in his love for Parker.
‘What’s this about?’ I ask, and she shrugs. For a moment, I think she’s not going to tell us, then the floodgates open.
‘Everything is so shit,’ she says, hands shaking, starting to cry.
‘My friends whine about how hard life is and I just want to scream, YOUR DAD DIDN’T DIE!
When it’s Father’s Day at school, the teachers bang on about the big breakfast as if I’m not even there, like I just have to suck up the whole thing and pretend it didn’t happen to me.
I never see you. Mum broke up with Rose’s dad, so I never see her either.
You and Mum told me it wasn’t my fault …
’ Now the sobs are free flowing, and she grabs both my hands and squeezes so tight it hurts.
‘It was, Audrey! Of course it was! And I hate my life without him. He loved me so hard!’
She’s almost out of breath. ‘As for this?’ She pulls her cuffs up again, showing us. ‘I felt too much. Then I felt nothing. And now I just want to feel something … This hurts just like everything else, but I’m in control of it.’
There’s a fresh round of tears while plastic plates of sushi trundle past and the three of us drown in unfamiliar waters.
‘Audrey, please don’t tell Mum. She’ll hit the roof.’
I glance at Josh for backup. Josh. The playboy uncle, who swans through New York, full of his own importance, and then blows in once a year with fancy gifts from Juilliard.
‘Parker,’ he says. ‘Do you want to stop?’
She sniffs, and I pass her a tissue. ‘I don’t know how.’
‘Don’t worry about how. But do you want to?’
She takes a big breath, her tears calming, and nods.
‘There’s a way through this. It’s not easy, but it exists.’
Where is he getting this information? I try to steal a glance at his own wrist, but it’s hidden behind the Rolex Oyster and a silver cuff link. Why is he so dressed up?
‘Audrey isn’t going to break your confidence,’ he says, ‘but if you can’t tell your mum, I will have to. She needs to know.’
Parker looks in despair from him—bad cop—to me.
‘It will be okay. She’ll know what to do. This is her job,’ I assure her.
I feel Fraser here now, circling the three of us, holding us up.
Smoothing the way, as if this whole encounter, right when I’m needed, was meant to be.
Because this—after all those lunches and lifts and cheering on sidelines, all that help with homework and soothing her grazes and calming her nightmares—this feels more important than anything else. It feels like my motherhood moment.
‘A very clever young woman told me mental health issues aren’t a choice,’ I say.
‘And you know where she likely heard that? From her psychiatrist mum. Trust me, Parker, she was there for me in a big way. She’ll be brilliant with this if you let her be.
And …’ I look at Josh. God, how have we ended up in something together?
‘Your uncle and I are here for you, too. I could come with you and help talk to her if you like?’
She’s trying to hold herself together. Thirteen is a difficult age at the best of times, worse with the snowballing trauma she’s lived through.
And when she can’t keep her tears at bay, she throws her arms around my neck.
‘I don’t care what Mum thinks,’ she whispers.
‘She’s wrong. You’ve always been a wicked stepmother. ’
‘Keep me posted?’ I ask Josh after we’ve dropped her back. I really didn’t want a reason for us to have to keep in touch, but if there ever was one, this is it. Parker has Maggie. And, as much as I hate this, I feel like between us, Josh and I represent Fraser.
‘It sounds like you’ve been through a lot,’ he says, his voice compassionate. I am not going to fill him in on any more of that. ‘You know you can always ask me for help. I’m not the enemy you think I am.’
He is exactly the enemy I think he is. I shake my head and turn to go, but he grabs my arm.
‘There’s something else,’ he says, looking very much as though he doesn’t want to elaborate. He checks the time. ‘I’ve got a meeting now, but can we find a time to talk?’
‘Do we have to?’ I know this man. He’s always looking for a crack in the door to push through.
‘Sully, I need to tell you why I really came back. And you’re not going to like it.’