Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
Maurizio
And then I waited. Seconds passed, several, and then she offered me a simple nod. What did it mean though? Did she accept my explanation and wanted to build something with me? Or was it an acceptance of me being a dickhead?
“I understand, and Bea said very similar.”
The frown that creased my brow had nothing to do with Flora, nor Bea really, but was more to do with my discomfort and dislike at being discussed as I clearly had been.
I prided myself on being a good person who was not the subject of gossip.
I liked to keep my private business just that, private, and through my own stupid actions, it wasn’t.
I ignored the voice in my head pointing out that the relationship I had now embarked on with my children’s nanny was likely to make gossip about me more likely than ever.
“However . . .”
Cocking my head slightly, I braced myself for impact.
“. . . regardless of what you were going through, it was inappropriate, and Bea should have been safe from your clumsy, drunken passes, but I accept you made a mistake and regret it.”
Flora was right and I had nothing more to add in terms of a defence. Flora suddenly began to fidget in her seat, her glance flitting between the clock on the wall and everywhere other than me, suggesting she was avoiding the next conversation, the one we originally came down here to have.
“Flora, I’m not going to force you to give me a blow by blow account of what happened to make you so fearful last night. Last night and that day when your car broke down, but I’d really like to know something of what made you so frightened.”
Her eyes fixed firmly on my face and with a hard swallow, she began to speak. “My parents died in a car crash during a storm.”
She looked startled by the bluntness of her own words, not as startled as me but definitely taken aback.
“I’m so sorry.” It sounded wholly inadequate to offer sympathy wrapped up in two short words when Flora had lost both of her parents in such a tragedy, one that she had been clearly traumatised by.
I couldn’t imagine how it might have felt for her to have lost both of them together and as glad as I’d been that she and her sister were close before, I was beyond grateful for it now.
As I tried to order my thoughts and consider what else to say, she continued and my mind was blown completely.
“It was my fault.”
The urge to dispute what she was saying was strong and yet I couldn’t. One because I didn’t know the details of the horror that had befallen her family but also because I wasn’t sure that’s what she wanted from me. Although I was certain that it wasn’t her fault, how could it be?
“Maddie and I were supposed to go to a camp with school. I only wanted to go because of Maddie. She had lots of friends, still does, whereas I had a very small circle and my sister was the main member of it. The day before we were due to go, I found out that Maddie’s boyfriend was going too.
He was her first boyfriend and when they were together, nobody else existed. ”
Flora laughed, startling me until she explained.
“I wasn’t all that interested in boys and found them to be either irritating or intimidating.
There was a boy I had a crush on but he shut me down when my friend did that whole, my friend really likes you, do you like her?
As such, I didn’t fully understand how Maddie and Harry were so oblivious to anything that wasn’t the two of them. ” She giggled. “I get it now though.”
I wasn’t so foolish as to belief that she had only begun to understand the obsession of her sister’s teenage romance since we’d become involved, however her slightly lowered eyes, the flush across her cheeks and the coy smile she was wearing suggested she might have rediscovered it of late.
“What happened?” As much as I was enjoying the image of adolescent Flora that was being painted, I didn’t see what this had to do with her parents dying and her part in it.
“When I found out Harry was going to camp, I tried to back out, but I couldn’t, so the night before, I pretended to be sick so my parents wouldn’t send me, and it worked.
With Maddie away, my parents who had planned a date night for just the two of them at some fancy restaurant, ended up changing their reservation to a more family friendly place with me as the third wheel.
We had dinner and as much as I hadn’t wanted to go to camp, I was a bit moody and missed Maddie.
I complained about the food and was generally sulky.
As we left the restaurant, it started to rain, something else I complained about.
When we all went out together, my dad drove and my mum rode up front with him, as much as anything to stop me and Maddie arguing about who was sitting next to him.
However, that night with it just being the three of us, I called shotgun and got away with it.
The rain got worse and visibility deteriorated as the storm began to increase.
There was rain, thunder, lightning, wind, even hale descended at one point.
It really was a storm of biblical proportions. ”
Where this was going was clear to me, but I still didn’t get where Flora’s guilt came from beside her being the reason for her parents’ change of restaurant.
“The route back home was one my father knew well but some of the roads were narrow and had no lighting aside from the headlights of the car. A song came on the radio as we approached a particularly precarious road that had a hill one side of it and an inadequate fence that overlooked a sheer drop into rocks and a valley below.”
Potentially the reality of this was far worse than I might have imagined.
Staring across at Flora, she looked blank.
It was as though she was reciting a script rather than reliving the most horrific of memories.
Her voice sounded as indifferent as her face remained expressionless.
I would have expected tears or a few broken sobs, at the very least the stammering of words that were heavy with emotion, but there were none.
She continued to speak, and I refocused on her words rather than worrying about the conflict between her emotional state and that of her apparent calmness.
“I had turned the radio up and was singing along, but as we began driving on that road, my dad turned it down. I turned it back up and he shouted as he turned it back down. I shouted back at him and said I wished I’d gone with Maddie.
My mum was trying to calm everything down but between mine and my dad’s raised voices and the deafening storm she was barely a whisper.
My dad told me he’d wished I’d gone with Maddie too, and that is when the brightest flash of lightning I had ever seen, well, until last night, lit up the sky and that coincided with the sound of thunder shaking the car. ”
Relief washed over me as I observed Flora’s emotions kick in, the wall of her feelings coming down a little. She swallowed hard before dropping her head until it rested in her hands, albeit briefly. Raising her head, she looked back at me and the first tear rolled down her cheek.
“It all happened so quickly. A tree was hit by the lightning causing it to fall and it would have hit the car had my dad not swerved. I just remember the light and noise of the storm along with my own screams as I willed it to stop and for everything to be okay, but as he swerved more lightning struck above us. It was truly blinding, so much so that the next thing I knew, we had crashed through the fence and we were hurtling towards the trees and the valley below. I don’t know how long it took for us to come to a standstill . . . it had felt like a lifetime.”
I don’t know that I planned on interrupting her but the next thing I knew, two more words left my lips, possibly more inadequate and impotent than my earlier, I’m sorry. “Oh, Flora.”
Tears were accompanied by a few breathy sobs as she waved away my words and my attempt to move to her, to comfort her.
“I remember hearing my mum crying and calling out to me while the car was falling but by the time we landed she was silent. When I turned to see why she was quiet, there was blood everywhere and she was already dead. Her window had been smashed and a piece of glass had hit her neck, puncturing the carotid artery. I don’t know that I knew she was gone, but the blood scared me as did her silence.
My dad was still alive at that point and trapped behind the wheel.
The driver’s side of the car had taken the brunt of the impact.
He talked to Mum and when she didn’t answer he began to cry .
. . I think he knew. He was in a bad way himself and needed help, but he was more worried about me than himself.
He kept telling me to get out of the car in case it fell any further or maybe he was worried it might explode.
I didn’t want to leave them. I pleaded with him to be okay, to get out of the car with me, but he couldn’t.
I don’t know how long we were there or the time that passed before I got out of the car to find help.
He told me how much he loved me, me and Maddie, how much him and Mum loved us and how happy and proud we made them.
I kept apologising for being such a pain that night and for not going with Maddie.
I even confessed that I hadn’t really been sick so could have gone to camp, but of course my parents already knew that.
I kissed him, one final time and with a promise of finding help, he told me he loved me and that he would be there when I got back, that he’d hang on and then I left them. ”
Somewhere between her waving away my attempt to move to her and her finishing that sentence that sounded like an admission of guilt and then I left them, I had gotten up, pulled her to me, held her and now we were huddled together, her in my lap while I had everything I could wrapped around her.
With the volume of her cries increasing, I held her tighter.
Instinctively, I rocked her, gently at first and then with slightly more force as if that would give greater comfort, although I wasn’t sure who I was hoping to comfort most, me or her.
I had no words to offer her, not a single one, not least because I had no understanding or comprehension of what she had gone through, well, nothing beyond the facts she had shared.
A heavy silence sat around us after a length of time I had no way of measuring.
“It was dark and I was scared. I tried to find my way to a road or where someone who could help might be. The storm continued for hours and I lost my way so many times or I hid, desperate for shelter and protection from the elements that had already hurt me so much that night. By the time I found someone, although, they actually found me, the sun had started to rise and it was too late. A rescue team went to the scene to recover the car and the bodies. My dad, he was dead too. I took too long, Maurizio, he hung on like he’d said until he couldn’t wait any longer. ”
She was hysterical now, tears running down her face faster than she could wipe them away. I felt like the world’s biggest shit for having forced this revelation, and yet I was glad to know about her fear of storms. I also knew that from this day going forward she would never face another one alone.