Chapter 38
Three Months Later
‘You’re looking so well,’ Mum gushes as Amara opens the front door.
It’s true, Amara does look well in a long cobalt-blue dress and her hair straightened flat and silky. She looks how she used to before, like an older, sterner version of Kasie.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘You too, Eartha, always beautiful.’
Mum sighs with relief. She was concerned about how to dress today; the overly warm weather, combined with being appropriate for what is essentially a memorial party, threw her.
Amara glances at me and we have a brief hug.
It’s the first time we’ve seen each other since she confronted me after no-showing at the church last year.
However, there have been many messages back and forth, especially in the run-up to this week, which is cruelly both Kasie’s birthday and the anniversary of Kasie’s death.
As we walk to the kitchen, Mum hands over a tote bag of shopping. ‘Brought a few picky bits,’ she says. ‘It’s all yellow label so I’d eat the meaty stuff first.’
Amara politely enquires about the YouTube channel and Mum launches into a weighty speech about the state of online travel content. This is what I brought her along for, to fill up any awkwardness with her chatter.
The kitchen is filled with the faces of people I haven’t seen in a year, members of Kasie’s family, a few colleagues she was close to, and her friends from church, who I always struggled to connect with.
One by one they hug me and comment on how long it’s been, and in doing so, they also unintentionally shame me a little.
‘Is Ikenna going to be here?’ Mum whispers as we make our way to the garden. ‘I don’t want to get stuck listening to him go on all afternoon.’
‘There was a time, not too long ago, when you would have literally given me away to him.’
‘And I still would. I just don’t need to hear his voice.’ She drifts off to work the party, while I join a group surrounding Alex as he basks in his post-marathon glory. A small girl I don’t recognise takes the seat next to me and inspects a pink Tamagotchi hanging from her belt loop.
‘How’s it doing?’ I ask.
‘Always hungry,’ she moans. ‘You wanna watch it?’
‘Um, I’m not good at looking after things.’
‘I’ll do it,’ Ikenna says, valiantly.
‘Where did you spring from?’
Sheepishly, he sits down next to me. ‘Vaping,’ he whispers. ‘Don’t tell Alex, I keep promising him I’m going to quit. Let me see,’ he says to the girl. She hands it over, then takes off, screeching after another child. ‘How have you been, Zoe?’
‘Good. Great. You?’
‘These have changed from the ones back in the day.’ He scowls down at the pet as it beeps. ‘What does it want?’
‘Your love.’
He pauses to stare at me for a few seconds, then his eyes move elsewhere. ‘Amara keeps checking over here. Have you spoken to her today?’
‘Yes. When I arrived, I said hi.’
‘Hi? That’s all?’
As discreetly as possible I swivel round to check the garden and catch the blue of Amara’s dress in my eyeline.
‘Go and talk to her,’ he says.
‘You know, the people who invented Tamagotchis got an Ig Nobel Prize. It’s like a spoof Nobel.’
‘How is that relevant?’
I huff and stand up. ‘Fine.’ As I walk over to Amara, she turns towards me and smiles. ‘Zoe?’
‘Can we talk?’
‘Good idea.’ She puts a hand on my arm in a way that’s so much like Kasie, it makes me lose my breath. ‘Let’s go inside. I have something I wanted to ask you about.’
As I follow Amara up the stairs, it occurs to me how unfamiliar I am with this house.
Despite Kasie and I being best friends through school, we never spent that much time at each other’s homes.
Amara wasn’t keen on visitors, and I tended to avoid having friends over, aware of how strange my dad came across and how much my mum would insert herself into any situation.
Kasie and I spent summers in the park, mostly on the same bench, and colder months in the PC room at the library, where we’d sneak fizzy drinks and browse the internet for hours.
‘Is this all Kasie’s stuff?’ I ask, as we enter a room filled with boxes.
‘No, we donated the majority of her things,’ Amara says quickly, as if sensing my alarm at the idea that they’d yet to touch any of her things, a year on. ‘This is a mixture of all sorts.’
Now I look properly, there’s sports equipment and old furniture, a bouncer and folded pushchair.
‘There are some things I’m not sure about,’ Amara says, trying for my attention. ‘Kasie was a bit of a hoarder.’
‘I noticed that about her, yes.’
Amara hands me a yellow document wallet. ‘Do you want these? I won’t be offended if you say it’s rubbish and I shouldn’t have kept it. I just wasn’t sure.’
The wallet is dense with scraps of paper, the notes we used to pass to each other at school. I laugh as I unfold one; it’s in my handwriting and details evidence our history teacher was having an affair with a student.
‘Why did Kasie keep these? Psychotic.’
Another, in Kasie’s terrible handwriting, is about Ryan and Marissa, who I’m not sure were real people we went to school with or characters from a TV show she once made me watch.
‘I didn’t read them,’ Amara says.
‘Thank God for that.’
She bristles as I do what Kasie used to gently berate me for, taking the Lord’s name in vain.
‘Thanks for this,’ I say, already excited to spend time going through the notes later, to reminisce and laugh. ‘They’re definitely not rubbish.’
‘Good,’ she says, ‘I’m glad.’
While my eyes stay on the notes, I feel Amara’s attention still on me.
‘How’s your exercise going?’ she asks.
‘I don’t exercise.’
‘Alex said you run.’
‘Oh, yeah, I do run.’ It’s embarrassing admitting it and a little weird that Alex told her. ‘I run around the park, nothing like what he did.’
‘Running is good,’ she says. ‘Exercise is good for your mental health.’
‘I’ve heard.’ I hope that didn’t come out too sarcastic.
‘Alex says it’s a great way to clear his mind.’
He said this to me as well, and while he didn’t lie, it’s more that I was imagining a euphoric high, rather than being absorbed by the feeling of fire in my lungs and lead in my legs.
Amara sits on the window ledge; her feet almost don’t touch the carpet. Kasie was short. But was she this small? Why can’t I remember?
‘Your mum tells me you’re moving out of the flat,’ Amara says. ‘That’s good.’
‘Yes. My brother bought a place in Staines, so I’m moving in with him next month.
I’m hoping to start saving to get on a shared ownership scheme next year.
Though looking at the prices, I might need to get a better-paying job.
I applied for something but didn’t get it.
’ The desperation to impress her is clear, though I guess I have always wanted Amara to think I’m a good person, worthy of being Kasie’s friend and having Kasie’s time, which was more limited than any of us could ever have imagined.
‘Shared ownership is good; it’s the only way young people can get on the ladder.’ Amara gives a small speech on property and how important owning it is. I nod along and at one point she pats the ledge next to her for me to join.
Down in the garden my mum is now sitting with Ikenna, her mouth not moving. Above them a small-headed white cat slinks along the fence. ‘I didn’t know you had a cat.’
‘You don’t like cats?’ Amara asks.
I’m quick to say, ‘No, I love them.’ Because I’ve not done all this self-PR to have Amara judge me as the kind of person who doesn’t like cats. ‘I just didn’t know you had one.’
‘I don’t. It’s probably the neighbours’.
Silence.
‘I am sorry,’ I say.
Amara looks away from the window and back into the room filled with the objects of her family’s life. ‘You’ve already apologised to me, Zoe. You don’t need to keep doing it.’
‘Kasie asked me to visit her in hospital and I didn’t.’
‘It happened so quickly at the end,’ Amara says. ‘You weren’t to know.’
How can she say this without breaking down?
‘Kasie specifically asked me,’ I say again, because Amara should know that perhaps I wasn’t worthy of Kasie after all.
‘You were there for her every other time. The hospital was just a place.’
‘A place she expected me to be. And she had told me that, after that winter when she—’
‘That’s enough, Zoe,’ Amara says. ‘That’s enough.’
I thread my fingers together and try to imagine Kasie being silenced by her mum’s gentle tone and firm words.
‘The first time I met you I had no idea what you two had in common. Yet you spent all your time together. You got Kasie out of her shell. Got her out of the house. Away from me. You made her go abroad,’ Amara says as if still surprised. ‘She really had a thing for Italy, didn’t she?’
I close my eyes for a second and picture us kicking our sliders off by a pool, testing the water with a foot, and confirming we wouldn’t bother to swim.
‘She would have loved Cambodia too. Did you ever get to go?’
‘No. I don’t think I ever will.’
‘You should. If you get the chance. Go and have your photo taken at Angkor Wat like Lara Croft.’
‘Lara Croft?’ I say, impressed.
Amara side-eyes me. ‘You think I haven’t learned something over the years.’
We go back to staring into the room of stuff. So much stuff.
‘Of course I didn’t want Kasie to leave home. She was my baby. But I could see how much she loved living with you, how excited she got about planning those trips every summer.’
I’m struggling to keep it together. ‘I didn’t want to cry today,’ I confess. ‘I don’t want to cry ever again.’ I pull the neck of my dress up and wipe my face as the first tears fall.
‘It’s fine,’ she says.
‘And you? How have you been?’
‘Busy. I still work three days a week, and then I have my church, and my dad who needs extra care, and of course my grandson.’ At this she softens. ‘He keeps me busy.’
‘He’s so cute.’
She tells me a story about taking him to the zoo and while I’m listening I can’t get over how she’s so much warmer than I ever gave her credit for. I feel almost remorseful I never got to know her when Kasie was around.
‘Anyway,’ she says, standing from the ledge, ‘I think your mother might need saving from Ikenna. That boy can talk.’
It makes me laugh.
As we head down, she asks, ‘Now you’re a runner, do you think you’ll do the marathon one year?’
And not wanting to let her down, I squeak out the word, ‘Possibly.’
‘Next year?’ she asks with a smile.
‘Hmm. No rush.’
‘Don’t wait too long. Time flies when you’re not paying attention to it.’
It jars me because time flying is exactly what I’ve wanted for so long.
The passing of days, weeks and months has been the number one healer for me.
I remember when Kasie had broken up with a long-term boyfriend and I’d said something like, time heals.
She’d studied me gravely and corrected, ‘Time doesn’t heal.
Jesus does.’ I laughed so hard, and she didn’t speak to me for hours.
It’s been a year since Kasie died, and it does feel easier.
I feel bad admitting this to myself; it’s like saying I’m not as upset about losing her now as I was then.
It’s not that. It’s that it’s getting easier to live with.
I go days without thinking about her, weeks without crying.
The hurt feels different now, less like a raging pain hitting at different parts of me and more like something set and solid, a heavy thing I’m learning to carry.
Another year, and who knows?