Chapter Three
‘Fletcher! Fletcher!’
Hissing clearly wasn’t working, so I raised my voice as loud as I dared, glancing around anxiously in case someone from the Neighbourhood Watch came out and complained about the early morning disturbance.
Fletcher had either gone conveniently deaf or was having far too much fun to respond to my commands. It was my fault for unclipping his lead at the top of the driveway. Instead of trotting obediently towards my parents’ front door, his ears had suddenly shot up, as though he’d been summoned. Which was kind of ironic, because when I attempted to call him back moments later, all he did was ignore me.
I watched him shoot down the neighbours’ driveway at a speed which belied the many slices of toast he’d enjoyed over the last year. Even the narrow gap beneath the garden gate did little to slow him down. He simply dropped to his belly and wriggled beneath it before disappearing from sight.
I looked around, convinced net curtains must be twitching at every window as I briskly followed my dog into next door’s front garden, glancing at the weather-beaten For Sale sign hammered into the lawn. Mum had mentioned last night that the house was currently empty and had been up for sale for around six months.
For a horrible moment I thought I might have to scale the fence to retrieve my runaway dog, but the gate was stiff rather than locked, and a hefty shove released the latch. The back garden was a suburban jungle and looked nothing like it had done when the Bakers lived there. I’d spent so many hours in this garden between the ages of eleven and fifteen, and yet today I scarcely recognised it.
I caught a fleeting glimpse of Fletcher’s bushy tail as he vanished into the undergrowth and sent up a silent plea that whoever lived here last had kept the fences in good repair. The thought of losing Adam’s dog was too terrible to contemplate.
I moved fast through the dense foliage, scarcely noticing the thorny rose bush that snagged my quilted jacket, or the bite of the stinging nettles as I pushed them aside. What was impossible to ignore however, was the huge, felled sycamore. I’d assumed it had long since been cleared away, but it still lay exactly where it had fallen in the November storm. Its roots were enormous, reaching into the air like a tangle of tentacles, seeking but never finding the soil they had been ripped from.
I felt a momentary sadness for the tree’s ignoble demise, but my attention was more focused on Fletcher, who had somehow managed to scale the fallen tree and got himself caught in its branches. He was barking loud enough to wake any resident in the street who I hadn’t already disturbed.
‘Shhhh,’ I hissed, as I looked for a way through the branches to reach him. ‘This is what happens when you don’t come when I call you.’
I shrugged out of my jacket before it sustained further damage and scrabbled over the enormous tree trunk to reach my dog, who was now whining and looking very sorry for himself.
There was a weird feeling of serendipity to once again be climbing the old sycamore, something I’d never expected to do twenty years or so after my first journey into its branches. Thankfully it was easier now it was horizontal, and within a minute or two I was close enough to Fletcher to see the relief in his eyes. ‘It’s meant to be the other way around, dog – you’re meant to save me from danger,’ I muttered as I fought my way through the branches to reach his collar and haul him out.
But then, as I bent towards him, I saw something I’d never imagined I would see again. I pulled aside a few spindly branches, releasing a very excitable Fletcher and fully revealing the section of tree where he’d become ensnared.
Fletcher, his lesson learnt, was trying to climb on to my lap to cover my face with grateful swipes of his tongue, but I scarcely felt them. I shook my head in disbelief as I reached out and traced the grooves in the bark that time had scarcely diminished. Josh’s name and mine were just as clearly visible in the tree trunk as they’d been twenty years ago, on the day he’d carved them into the wood.
The tree was vast, easily over twenty metres tall. Fletcher could have got caught anywhere along its length, and yet he had ended up in the exact spot that marked the beginning of my friendship with Josh. Those two etched names would forever hold the memory of the day I’d stood at my bedroom window and watched a boy I’d never seen before climb a tree in our neighbours’ garden, and for some inexplicable reason had decided to follow him. They marked the start of a friendship so precious that I’d known my first experience of heartbreak because of it, when four years later the Bakers and their foster children had moved away. But by then my foolish teenage heart was already his. Not that I’d ever found the courage to tell him that, of course.
And now, two decades later, with all sorts of uncomfortable history between us, with gallons of water – much of it muddy – beneath the bridge, and my late husband’s request forever ringing in my ears, fate had put me right back at the spot where it all began.
I raised my eyes towards the sky as though Adam was indeed up there, hidden from sight by the gathering grey clouds.
‘Alright, hon. I get it. You’ve made your point. I’ll find him. God knows how, but I’ll do it . . . but only because you asked me to.’
‘The Bakers? Goodness, I haven’t thought about them in ages. Why do you ask?’
‘I was just wondering if you had a current address for them, that’s all,’ I said, trying and failing to sound nonchalant. Mum stopped folding the clothes from the tumble dryer and studied me for a moment, her head tilted to one side. It was a pose I remembered from old.
‘You do know Mrs Baker – Janette – passed away, don’t you?’ Mum didn’t usually tiptoe around the word ‘died’ the way so many people did with the recently bereaved. I swear in the last year I must have heard every euphemism going, from ‘being called home’ to ‘crossing the rainbow bridge’, which I’m pretty sure is only meant to be for cats and dogs.
Mum was obviously still conscious of yesterday’s milestone anniversary. And she had no way of knowing that I was perfectly aware that Josh’s foster mother had died. I’d been at the funeral eight years earlier.
‘Yes. I knew about that. I was just curious if you still had Gordon Baker’s address? You know, from Christmas cards or whatever.’
Mum’s interest was piqued, which was exactly what I’d been hoping to avoid. There was also a surprising look of remorse on her face. ‘No, Lily. I’m afraid we lost touch over the years. I believe they moved house several times after leaving the area.’
They did. That much I knew.
‘Then I heard from a mutual friend that Gordon had gone into a care home a few years ago. Poor man. His dementia got so much worse after he lost Janette.’
That I wasn’t aware of. I felt a sharp pang of sadness for the couple who’d always been incredibly kind to me, which tipped over into a feeling of sorrow for Josh, knowing he’d effectively lost both the people who’d been more like parents to him than his biological ones had ever been.
‘You don’t know which care home, I suppose?’
Mum stopped trying to wrangle a fitted base sheet into a folded rectangle and leant forward on the kitchen table. All at once I felt like an unreliable witness about to be quizzed by a very experienced barrister.
‘What’s this all about, Lily?’
I bit my lip, not sure how much I wanted to tell her. Somehow, I’d never found the right moment to explain the events of six years ago to her, and the impossible situation I’d found myself in. When your parents had happily spent thousands of pounds on an enormous wedding, they probably didn’t want to hear that forty-eight hours before the big day, something had happened that made you suddenly question whether you were making the right choice.
Luckily, all that chaos and indecision had disappeared during my explosive row with Josh, and I’d never had to tell anyone how close I’d come to breaking two hearts in one fell blow.
And none of that mattered anymore anyway. Because Adam had been the right choice. I’d loved him with all my heart and would continue to do so until the day I died. Which made trying to find Josh an even more ridiculous and pointless exercise. But a promise is a promise.
‘I think Muriel – that mutual friend I was telling you about – I think she might have the address of the care home. Would you like me to ask her for it next time I go into town?’
I paused for a very long moment. ‘Actually, Mum, can you ask her for it now? Today.’
There were a million questions dancing behind my mum’s eyes. But she didn’t ask any of them. It was one of the things I loved best about her. She knew when to probe, but more importantly, she also knew when to say nothing at all.