Abby
Abby
Abby holds Clio’s hand as the boat skims across the water. Behind them, the skipper looks steadily forward, eyes trained on the horizon. The wind bites Abby’s cheeks, but both she and Clio have wrapped up warm – hats, gloves, scarves; they have both been here before, know how unforgiving the weather can be. But despite the harsh temperatures, the sun shines overhead, and Abby could not be more grateful. She knows how rare such a day is on the Sn?fellsnes peninsula, knows from their previous trip, just over six years ago, that the weather in Iceland is nothing if not unpredictable.
Glancing behind her, the rugged land juts out of the water – craggy, unapologetic, as if the hills might, at any moment, transform into living beings – and Abby is reminded of the stories from Norse mythology that Isla loved reading as a child.
Grief tightens around her throat, and she breathes in the crisp, brisk air.
It was Clio’s idea to come here on the first anniversary of Isla’s death; back to the location of their final family holiday just two months before Stuart died. Isla was twelve, Clio ten, and they had all fallen in love with Iceland’s dramatic landscapes: its snow-capped mountains, erupting volcanoes, theatrical geysers. Both Abby and Stuart had been amazed how far the girls were willing to hike – fifteen kilometres a day – to waterfalls and volcanic craters, past hot springs and glaciers. But it was here, on Breieafjoreur fjord, that they had experienced the highlight of their trip: a pod of orcas gliding through the water, six adults and a calf, a once-in-a-lifetime sighting. Isla had been mesmerised, talked about it for months afterwards. In the year before she was killed, she had researched volunteering opportunities in Iceland, said she was thinking of spending her summer before university helping out on an environmental project.
Clio squeezes Abby’s hand, and Abby turns, smiles at her. It is remarkable how much Clio has changed over the past year. How much she has matured. All the chaos Abby found on Clio’s phone – the smoking, drinking, socialising with older boys, messing about in cars which, Clio has insisted, she never actually drove – has been acknowledged, though Clio has said she doesn’t want to discuss it. She has promised it was just a phase she was going through, assured Abby it is now behind her. They are aspects of Clio’s past that Abby assumes – hopes – Clio talks about with the therapist she has been seeing twice a week for the past ten months. It has been transformative, Clio being in counselling, and Abby now regrets not finding therapists for both her girls when Stuart died.
Clio is no longer friends with Freya. She has a new best friend, Sophie, with whom her life seems calmer, less frenetic. In many ways, Clio is more reserved now – more introspective, more thoughtful – but in other ways she is undoubtedly more confident. A quiet confidence, a sense of self-belief she never had in the past. Sometimes Abby wonders – guiltily – whether Clio simply never had the space to flourish before, whether living in Isla’s shadow was like being a sapling on the forest floor, unable to access the necessary light in order to grow. At other times, she wonders if Clio feels pressure now to be grown-up, to achieve things, to try to fill the enormous gap Isla left behind. Abby keeps a close eye on her, but for now, at least, Clio seems okay. She did surprisingly well in her GCSEs given the year she’d had, seems to be settling into sixth-form life at Collingswood with relative ease. But Abby is well aware how skilfully teenagers can mask their problems and hide their secrets. She will not allow herself to miss any signs a second time around. She is careful not to repeat the same mistakes she made with Isla; not to rely emotionally on Clio, not to lean on her for comfort, support, for the kind of conversations she might be having with Stuart if he were still alive. She knows how important it is for Clio to be a regular sixteen-year-old, wants Clio to understand that she is not responsible for Abby’s emotional wellbeing.
The skipper calls out to them, points to a trio of puffins sitting on a small, rocky island in the bay. Clio slips a glove from her hand, pulls out her phone, takes some photos. Abby watches, drinking in the scenery as the land recedes behind them.
A year after Isla’s death, still not an hour goes by when Abby is not arrested by grief so strong it physically winds her. A sense of loss so profound it is as though an ancient god has scooped out her heart and is feeding it to birds of prey. Mourning so acute she does not know how she will survive it, does not want to survive it, cannot bear to be conscious through the intensity of it. A year on and it is still incomprehensible to her that Isla is gone. It makes no sense, and she still cannot absorb the fact of it. The cavity in her chest – that gaping wound – still has the power to shock her and yet, simultaneously, it is accompanied by an awareness that this is how it is now; this feeling of being permanently ripped apart is what her life has become.
It is wrong to talk of her heart being broken. Something that is broken has the possibility of being fixed. But Abby’s grief for Isla can never be fixed. Her pain is not something that will ever be mended. It is a part of her, a permanent scar, a load that she carries. Isla’s death is an indisputable facet of Abby’s life. There is no restoration from grief like this.
She pauses her thoughts, recalls what her therapist often tells her. Remembering those we’ve lost is key to our ability to live without them. One cannot exist without the other. We cannot learn to bear their absence if we do not allow ourselves to remember the significance of their presence.
Abby thinks about Tuesday night, about the third instalment of her counselling course. She is enjoying it more than she’d envisaged. It had been Clio’s suggestion that Abby train as a therapist. You’re a brilliant listener, Mum, and you always know the right things to say when people are upset. You’d be an amazing therapist . Initially, Abby had been sceptical, had brushed the idea aside; it seemed such a huge leap of faith from stay-at-home mum to trainee therapist. But the idea kept niggling at her, like a finger jabbed gently in the top of an arm. Eventually she’d done some research, found a course, plucked up the courage to email the admissions office. A few months later she was accepted. It is still early days, but she would like to specialise in child and adolescent counselling, would like to help young people negotiate the increasingly complex world in which they live.
She thinks about Jack, as she often does, more often than she would like sometimes. She wonders how he is, how the events of the past year might anchor themselves to his future. The last she heard, the boys were at a boarding school in Surrey, and Nicole had bought a house nearby for when she is released from prison.
Still, to this day, Abby does not know how she feels about Nicole, about Jack, about the whole Forrester family. Except Andrew. Andrew she loathes with a deep, visceral hatred. There were days, at the beginning, when it took all her self-restraint not to do something stupid, something she would come to regret. Something that would land her in the same place as Nicole. The only thing that stopped her was Clio: knowing that she could not – must not – do anything to jeopardise Clio’s future. It is only for Clio’s sake that she has kept thoughts of inflicting harm on Andrew – slow, torturous harm – to nothing more than a fantasy.
But Nicole is different. Nicole has tried to explain herself – again and again – in long, contrite letters. Each time one arrives, Abby promises herself that she will not read it; Nicole has nothing to say that Abby could possibly want to hear. Each time, the letter is tucked behind a photograph on the kitchen mantelpiece for a day or two, Abby resisting the urge to open it. And every time, after a few days have passed, there is a moment when Abby’s curiosity gets the better of her, when she picks it up, slides a finger under the flap, removes the handwritten pages inside. Reads what is written. She can sense Nicole’s desperate need for forgiveness as if it is a living, breathing being, drifting up from the words on the page, like a genie released from a bottle.
The truth is that, in spite of everything, Abby misses Nicole. Nicole was a central figure in her life for almost two decades. After Stuart died, she was the adult to whom Abby was closest: in whom she confided the most, shared the most, laughed the most, cried the most. Life without Nicole would have been unthinkable a year ago. And yet, here they are.
There have been moments when her empathy has got the better of her, when she has found herself imagining what it must have been like for Nicole that night, to have been faced with such an invidious dilemma. She has wondered what she would have done in a similar situation – whether she would have lied, betrayed, perverted the course of justice to protect her child. She cannot, in all honesty, claim that she would not. A parent’s love for their child is all-consuming; it goes beyond words, transgresses rational thought. Supersedes, sometimes, morality, conscience, the law. Abby knows she would do anything to shield Clio from harm, and she cannot definitively say that she would not do something illegal in order to defend her. And yet, in spite of this – in spite of understanding why, perhaps, Nicole acted the way she did that night, in spite of the gnawing ache with which she sometimes misses her – Abby knows that their friendship is broken beyond repair.
A gull flies low overhead, and it reminds Abby of the last time they were here. She thinks about Isla that day: so young, so innocent, so full of hope and enthusiasm. It has not escaped her attention that Isla would be starting university this week. In a different world – one in which Andrew had never groomed Isla, in which Jack had never found out, in which he had never gone to confront Isla in a stolen vehicle he was not equipped to drive – Abby would be accompanying Isla to university, watching her take her first, tentative steps towards independence. A rite of passage towards adulthood that every parent should have the privilege to experience with their child, however it manifests itself. An experience she will cherish all the more with Clio, when the time comes.
Sometimes, thinking about what has happened over the past six years – the death of her husband, the death of her child – Abby thinks it is a gift in life that we do not know what awaits us. If we did, we may not have the strength to bear witness.
Her thoughts pivot to Callum, to how he might be settling in at Oxford. Abby has had only scant contact with Jenna over the past eleven months. Soon after the truth emerged about Isla’s death, Abby went to Jenna’s flat, apologised profusely to her and Callum for her behaviour, for having suspected Callum’s involvement. Both Jenna and Callum were unfailingly magnanimous, and Abby felt humbled by their lack of grievance. Since then, her path has crossed only fleetingly with Jenna’s at school events. They have nodded courteously, said hello, nothing more. When Abby heard about Callum’s A-level results and his confirmed place at Oxford, she bought a card, posted it to Callum, sent Jenna a short WhatsApp message to congratulate them both. One of her greatest regrets about the last two years is to have judged Callum so unfairly; to have brought her prejudices to bear on a teenager who, it transpired, had more integrity than the adults she considered to be her closest friends. She hopes for only good things for Callum, hopes he is happy.
The skipper of the boat slows the engine, stills to a halt. Abby looks around. They are exactly where she wanted to be: far enough from the land to have a sense of space yet within sight of the mountains, close enough to feel safe.
She looks at Clio, who responds with a small, definitive nod. Reaching down to the rucksack wedged between her feet, Abby pulls out two square wooden boxes, each with an engraving on top. She hands one to Clio, holds one herself, and together they stand side by side at the edge of the boat.
The wind settles into a gentle breeze, and Abby leans over the side of the boat, eases the lid from the box she is holding, watches Clio do the same next to her. Gently, in unison, they begin to scatter the ashes on the surface of the water; Stuart and Isla returned together to a place they both loved. Grief narrows the walls of Abby’s throat, and she glances at Clio, sees tears slip down her daughter’s cheek. Slowly, tenderly, they empty the ashes into the water, watch them disperse, diffuse, until the boxes are empty.
For ten minutes, or twenty – Abby has no sense of time – she and Clio stand next to each other in silence, Abby’s arm around Clio’s shoulders, watching their father, husband, sister, daughter become part of the landscape. The only sound is the gentle lapping of waves against the hull, the call of gulls overhead, the whistle of the wind. She knows there is no perfect ending, no flawless goodbye. But this, she thinks – with the fortuitous blue sky and the golden sun, with the distant rocky mountains that will be here millennia after all of them are gone – is as close to a perfect resting place as it is possible to imagine.
Putting the lid back on the box she is holding, she turns to Clio, enfolds her in her arms. Today is not something any sixteen-year-old should have to experience.
They both turn their heads, look back out to sea. Somewhere among the fish and the phytoplankton, the whales and the dolphins, Stuart and Isla drift, dissolve, become a part of the ocean.
She does not know how long they stand there, saying their silent goodbyes as the boat rocks gently from side to side. Eventually, Abby looks over her shoulder at the skipper, gestures their readiness to leave, and the stutter of the engine slices through the silence.
As they’re steered back towards the shore, through the labyrinth of islands jutting out above the water, Abby keeps hold of Clio’s hand. It is just the two of them now. Stuart and Isla will always be a part of their lives, will always be present in spite of their absence. But, from here on in, it is all about her and Clio. And Abby knows – as profoundly as she has ever known anything – that she will do whatever it takes to be there for Clio: to love her, support her, to help guide her towards whatever their future may hold.