Chapter 9 Elise
Elise
Robbie wasn’t alone. In his arms, wriggling to get free, was Lulu, Charlie’s pug-dog.
“Lulu!” At the sound of Elise’s voice, the little dog began to wriggle even more, desperate to reach her.
“The foster family couldn’t cope with her,” Robbie explained, coming into the house. “They were going to send her to a rescue centre. I couldn’t bear the thought of her going somewhere we hadn’t vetted ourselves. I didn’t think you’d want that either.”
Elise took the dog from him and pressed her face into her fur. She smelt of Lulu. Of home. Of Charlie.
“Oh, Lulu,” she said, and as the tears began to flow down her face, the little dog promptly lapped at them, her warm, fawn-coloured body trembling with delight.
“Excuse me. I’ll leave you both to it,” Sam said, heading towards the back of the house.
“I’m sorry, Elle,” Robbie said when they were alone, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I know it’s probably hard for you to see her again, but I didn’t know what else to do.”
He reached out to stroke Lulu’s head. “Apparently she wouldn’t stop whining and scratching at the doors. They tried everything. I could tell how bad they felt about giving up on her.”
He sighed. “The thing is,” he said, “I can’t have her, can I? Not with my job. So that’s why I’ve brought her to you.” He paused for a moment, before playing his trump card. “It’s what Charlie would have wanted.”
He was right, and the knowledge of that was like a fat fist inside Elise’s chest. She’d felt like a total traitor when she’d made the call to the people who’d responded to their advert about Lulu.
All the time she was speaking to them, she’d heard Charlie’s voice inside her head, yelling no!
And yet at the time, giving up the dog had seemed the only option.
“It’s fine,” Elise said at last. “You did the right thing.”
Robbie smiled then, his face awash with relief. “God, I’m so glad you think so, Elle. Like I said, I just didn’t know what else to do. And Lulu . . . well, she is part of the family, after all.”
She turned away from him, carrying the blissed-out dog into the kitchen and sitting down so she could have her on her lap.
“Do you want a cup of tea?”
“In a minute. No hurry, though. So, you’re glad I brought Lulu?”
Elise looked down at the dog’s happy face and smiled. “Yes. It’s lovely to see her again. Especially today. It was wrong of us to give her away. It was . . . a mistake.”
Lulu jumped down from her lap to the floor, starting an investigation of the kitchen by sniffing every nook and cranny with such intense interest it was almost as if another dog had been in there recently.
“I suppose it’s hardly surprising if we made mistakes, is it?” she said. “Not with everything we were going through.”
Robbie nodded. “It was hard to think clearly about anything in those last few months,” he agreed. “I screwed up myself, I know that. When I wouldn’t consider letting Charlie . . .”
“Don’t,” Elise interrupted quickly, knowing exactly what he was going to say.
“Elle, I’m just saying . . .”
She put up a hand, cutting him off. “I’m sorry. I just can’t talk about it.”
Robbie ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “If we can’t talk about it now, on Charlie’s birthday, then when will we ever be able to? Never?” He paused, waiting for a response from her, but she didn’t have one to give.
Finally, he sighed. “It’s been so hard these past few months, Elle, feeling as if you blamed me for everything when I was only doing my best.”
She supposed it must have been hard for him. But, then, his frequent absences from Charlie’s bedside in the last few weeks of his life had been hard for her. And his complete refusal to listen to what either she or Charlie wanted.
Charlie’s last wish had been to visit Reykjavik in Iceland so he could see the Northern Lights and take a dip in a thermal pool.
“D’you think Daddy could take a few weeks off work to come too?” he’d said to Elise, his face alive with excitement. “We could stay in one of those ice hotels. They get a different artist to design every bedroom. I want a room with a big, growling bear statue. Or an eagle.”
It hadn’t seemed possible to Elise that her frail, poorly boy would even be able to travel to Iceland, let alone sleep in a bedroom of sculpted ice, yet she knew she would do anything on Earth to make it happen, if that was what he wanted.
To fill her child’s last days with joy and wonder.
To stand beside him as the sky pulsed with the green and purple of the Northern Lights.
But Charlie’s doctors had been against the trip, advising more chemotherapy. And Robbie had been against it too. “Reykjavik? D’you really think he’s up to it? Dr. Freeman has arranged for his chemotherapy to start on Friday, hasn’t he?”
Between them, they’d been an unmovable team. Filling Elise with doubts. Intimidating her into a submission she would always regret.
“I just wanted a little longer with my boy, that’s all,” Robbie said. “I thought it was for the best.”
He paused, waiting for her response. When none came, he sighed and said, “Anyway, at least you aren’t mad with me for bringing Lulu here. I’m glad about that.”
Elise had a sudden horrible thought. “Please tell me you didn’t deliberately go and get Lulu back, Robbie?” she asked, one hand covering her mouth. “Please tell me you didn’t take her from the Millers against their wishes?”
“No, of course not,” Robbie denied. But he wouldn’t quite meet her gaze as he spoke, and when he left shortly afterwards, she still wasn’t convinced.
After a few minutes, she went to find Sam. He was working in one of the back bedrooms fixing a windowsill and didn’t turn round straightaway when she came in. Then Lulu gave a little yap, and he stopped hammering.
Elise moved towards him, the dog following her. “It seems we have a houseguest. I hope you don’t mind? She’s called Lulu.”
Lulu ran straight over to Sam, her rear end moving enthusiastically from side to side as she greeted him. He bent to make a fuss of her. “Of course not. I love dogs. Hi, Lulu.”
Somehow, Elise felt compelled to give him an explanation. “We . . . Robbie and I . . . had given her up for adoption, but apparently she wouldn’t settle in her new home, so Robbie fetched her back.”
Sam kept his gaze turned towards Lulu. “What made you give her up? She seems adorable.”
If she was ever going to tell him about Charlie, this was the time.
She took a breath to give herself courage, her voice wobbling slightly as she dived in.
Each time she told someone about Charlie, it made it more real.
“Lulu was our son Charlie’s dog. Charlie .
. . well, he died, and afterwards we just couldn’t .
. .” Her voice trailed off. Sam was staring at her, wide eyed with shock.
“Your son died?”
Elise dropped her head, unable to bear the sympathy on his face, her voice coming out as a whisper. “Yes. About six months ago.”
“So recently? Elise, that’s . . . God, I am so sorry. How old was he?”
“Ten.”
“Like my Jasmine?”
She nodded, deciding not to mention it would have been Charlie’s eleventh birthday that day. Sam already seemed appalled enough, and in any case, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to speak the words without crying.
“I am so sorry. I just can’t imagine what you must have been through. If anything ever happened to Jasmine . . .” His eyes held hers. “What was Charlie like? If you don’t mind me asking?”
That brought the tears springing from her eyes.
“Sorry, that was insensitive of me.”
“No, not at all.” She paused to wipe her eyes. “I didn’t want to talk about any of it at first. Not to anybody. Not to the counsellor people insisted I see, not to my friends. Not even to my gran or Robbie.”
“You don’t have to now if you don’t want to.”
“No, I’d like to.”
So, with Lulu now asleep at her feet, Elise attempted to give Sam a true impression of her son.
“Charlie was good at art. And English. He loved stories—reading them and writing them. Especially science fiction. He’d add every book he ever read to a list.”
“That was very organised of him.”
“He was organised. Not like me. He liked to keep his room tidy, so always he knew where everything was. He adored all animals. I think . . . in a funny sort of a way, he was a country boy even though he’d only ever lived in a city.
He’d have loved Marsh House, I think. No, I know he would.
” And Sam. Instinctively Elise knew Charlie would have liked Sam.
He would have enjoyed watching Sam at work.
“Did he like computer games?” Sam asked. “Listening to music with his headphones on and never hearing you when he was called? Or hadn’t he got to that stage yet?” He was smiling gently at her, and Elise smiled sadly back.
“He was just starting to get into those things before he got ill, yes. But Charlie was never someone who was afraid to be different from his peers the way I was at his age. Charlie was happy in his own skin. I . . .” Elise’s voice started to shake slightly. “I . . . was so proud of him for that.”
It was the most Elise had spoken about her son in a very long while. People often assumed it would hurt her too much to talk about him, when in reality it hurt far more to behave as if Charlie had never existed.
“I know everyone thinks their child is special,” she said, her voice broken, “but he was; he really was.”
“I can tell he was,” Sam said. “Have you got a photo of him?”
She sniffed. “Yes, lots; on my camera. Shall . . . shall I get it?”
“Yes, please. I’d love to see them.”
Elise went upstairs to her bedroom to retrieve her camera—Lulu click-clacking her way on the bare floorboards behind her, not wanting to let her out of her sight—and scrolled through the images to find the one she wanted.
Her favourite photo of herself with Charlie, the two of them leaning against each other with identical smiles.
It had been taken by her gran on Charlie’s eighth birthday.