Chapter 21
Despite the many and varied distractions that Margo had put in place after the glimpse—including but not limited to a Christmas quiz in the bookshop, hot chocolate on the roof, and leapfrog in the clothes department—Casey couldn’t shake the sense of loss.
The grief for something that hadn’t even happened in her life hung from her ribs like sandbags.
She decided to walk home after her shift, wheeling her bike along beside her. It made for a protracted journey, but she needed the space. The morning was bitterly cold. The sun hadn’t yet risen fully, but she doubted its weak wintry rays would do much to warm her anyway.
By the time she reached Flour Power, her fingers were stiff inside her gloves. Mark saw her and came out to meet her, steam rising from out of the paper bag containing her loaf.
“Got a puncture?” he asked, checking her wheels.
“No, just fancied a walk.”
“You look frozen to the bone. Why don’t you come in, and I’ll make you a hot chocolate?”
She hesitated and then said, “Yeah, okay, that would be nice, thanks.”
Mark took her bike from her and slid it into the bike rack outside the shop. “Go on in and sit down,” he said. “There’s a heater on the wall next to table three.”
She smiled and slipped gratefully into the suggested booth, while Mark went behind the counter to make her drink.
The café tables were mostly empty, but Mark’s teenage daughter—dressed in her school uniform—was serving the queue of determined customers waiting to purchase hot, fresh bread from the racks behind her.
Casey yawned, the soothing contrast of warmth after the biting cold suddenly allowing her long night shift to catch up with her. She was grateful. She’d been worried her overactive mind would scupper her chances of sleep.
“Here.” Mark set a mug of hot chocolate with cream and marshmallows down on the table and shuffled into the booth to sit opposite her. “I have an ulterior motive for plying you with free drinks.” He shifted in his seat.
“Oh, well, if the drinks are free, at least you’re off to a good start,” she said, smiling as she scooped a spoonful of cream into her mouth. “This isn’t about me joining the women’s football team again, is it? You must know by now that my strengths lie more in the spectating.”
He sucked in a breath and winced as he chuckled. “Yeah, I’ve learned my lesson on that score.” He tightened one of the straps of his apron, playing for time. “It’s about Nate,” he said finally.
“I guessed as much,” she said. “He didn’t call you, did he?”
“He did; that’s the problem.”
Casey frowned.
“I don’t want to be going behind his back, but…” He looked uncomfortable. “I’m worried about him.”
“Tell me,” she said without preamble, still feeling raw after last night’s glimpse.
“He’s not coming back to the club, at all, not even for kickabouts. And he’s resigned from the board of governors.”
“Really?” This was news to her. “Did he say why?”
“Apparently, he told George that he can’t be taking risks, because he’s the only parent the kids have got left.”
She stirred her drink to mix in the last of the whipped cream. “I can’t believe he didn’t mention this to me; he’s been football mad since we were kids.”
Mark rubbed his shaved head with his hand.
“I don’t want to sound alarmist, Casey, but he’s worrying me.
First he pulls Conner out of juniors’ club, and now he’s removing himself completely.
We started at that club together, you know?
” He drummed his fingers on the table, and she waited for him to formulate his thoughts.
“I can’t explain it; I’ve just got a bad feeling.
I see it all the time at the club: Blokes can chase a ball around the field for ninety minutes without breaking a sweat, but ask them to talk about feelings and they start hyperventilating.
” He gave her a half smile and shrugged.
“I tell you, the patriarchy has a lot to answer for.”
She smiled knowingly at him. “Leave it with me. I’ll talk to him again.”
The warmth of the bakery had thawed her fingers, but Mark’s revelations coming on the back of last night’s glimpse chilled her.
She knew she was already losing precious hours of sleep, but she was afraid that when she closed her eyes all that would fill the black was visions of her other self, living in a world where her brother did not.
Or worse still, that she would sleep and her mind would funnel her into nightmares in which Nate went out to buy custard and never came back.
She sat on a bench in the park and tore off a piece of the fast-cooling loaf and ate it.
In a couple of minutes, she had gained a veritable posse of ducks who quacked expectantly at her until she shared her breakfast with them.
Small children bundled up in big coats made their way to school, hot breath puffing as they skipped or scootered along followed by harassed-looking parents.
Crows and seagulls skidded across the frozen lake, and squirrels darted up and down trunks and scampered over the hard ground searching for precious morsels.
The park was busy. People walked dogs, rode bikes, went for runs, and took shortcuts; they listened to music and podcasts and audiobooks and talked to their friends; and it all seemed so terribly, wonderfully normal.
But Casey knew that it was only ever half of the story—a snippet, a snapshot, the tip of the iceberg.
Most of these people, like her, had interior lives that were vast and deep and complex—and perhaps even harrowing, if they let themselves dwell there for too long—and the only way to keep going was to put on a facade of normalcy for the good of humanity, because if everyone were to air their mess at once, civilized society would grind to a halt.
Casey wondered now if she and Nate had enabled each other—via their shared aversion of confrontation—to push their difficult interior lives way down deep, far from any outlet for either purge or healing.
It was easier to squash down unpleasant emotions than face them.
But at what cost? She realized that she was doing it even now, sitting on a freezing bench rather than going home to face her demons.
Something had to give, or she and Nate would end up two wizened old hermits cut off from the rest of the world, and by extension Conner and Ellory’s world would shrink too, and that she couldn’t bear.
She got up stiffly, hardly able to feel her toes in her shoes, and began to wander slowly toward home.
—
Casey opened the gate, parked her bike, and walked wearily along the stepping-stone path to her cabin.
The sky was dark gray and heavy, and it lent a twilight feeling to the morning.
She turned her key in the door but found it unlocked.
Had she forgotten to lock it? Cautiously she pushed the door and let out a scream when she saw the outline of a figure sitting on her sofa.
“Bloody hell! Nate, you scared the shit out of me!” She clutched at her chest. “Why are you sitting in my cabin like a weirdo?” She closed the door behind her and flicked on the lamp, illuminating the room and the stony face of her brother.
“I didn’t know where you were.” Nate’s voice was quiet, his words pushed out through gritted teeth.
“I thought maybe you’d gone out for breakfast with your friend again like last time, but when I got back from taking the kids to school, you still weren’t home.
” His voice was rising uncharacteristically.
“You weren’t answering your phone. I thought something had happened to you. But no, you were just being selfish.”
When she’d got back from the glimpse, all she wanted to do was hug her brother and look into his face to reassure herself that he was still here, but now, coming home to this shitty greeting, her hackles rose.
“What is wrong with you? Where is all this coming from? I had my phone on silent, that’s all.
I’m sorry if you were worried, but I’m a grown woman, Nate.
I don’t answer to you. I am not your responsibility. ”
He huffed out a humorless laugh. “Right. Yeah. I mean, I practically raised you, but fine, sure…”
She took a deep breath in through her nose and out through her mouth to try and calm her rising temper.
He was right, after all; without him she might have gone off the rails.
“I’m sorry that you had too much responsibility too young.
That’s on our parents, I guess, but I’m all grown up now, and just because I live at the bottom of your garden doesn’t mean I’m your property. ”
“I thought something had happened to you!” The jagged sound of Nate’s raised voice pulled her up short. Nate never shouted. Neither of them did.
She made sure to keep her own voice even when she responded. “Nate, this can’t go on. This incessant worrying.”
“You were gone for hours. Hours!” Nate’s outrage exploded out of him. “And nobody knew where the hell you were. I called everyone I could think of…”
“Oh, for god’s sake, Nate,” she snapped, pulling out her phone. She found several missed calls from Nigel as well as texts from Sylvie and even Ajay. Great! Now she’d have to spend more of her sleeping time messaging them all back to explain that it was a false alarm. What were they going to think?
“What did you expect me to do?” Nate asked, as though this was her doing and not his overprotectiveness in overdrive.
“Oh my god, you are squashing me!” Casey countered, her frustration coming to the fore.
“And if you’re not careful, you’re going to squash Conner and Ellory too.
You took Conner, and yourself, for that matter, out of football club, a thing that you both loved.
And then there’s that business with Ellory’s gymnastics.
What is going on with you, Nate? Seriously. ”
“Do you know how many accidents there are each year in kids’ sports? They could break an arm, or a leg, they could break their necks…”
She saw for the first time how deep down the rabbit hole of fear her brother had fallen, and she softened her voice. “You can’t control everything. Life is going to happen whatever you do. Stuff happens, and we can’t stop it…”
“Stuff happens? My wife died! Grace wasn’t ‘stuff’!”
“I know, I know, I didn’t mean…” And this right here was why she had avoided having hard conversations with her brother. But she could see now that not having them was to his detriment. Hiding wasn’t helping either of them.
“She went to the corner shop and she never came back,” he went on.
Casey made her voice calm and placating, holding back her tears. “You’re right. And it was cruel and unfair, but you can’t go through your life expecting the worst to happen. It won’t always be bad news.”
“The worst already did happen!” he cried out.
And then he seemed to collapse in on himself, and all the anger went out of him.
He put his head in his hands. “You’re right.
I’m sorry. I don’t— I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
I’m worried all the time; I can’t turn it off.
” He sat bent forward in the chair, his head hanging.
Nate was a man at the end of his rope. She sat down gingerly beside him, giving him time to tell her to back off if he wanted to, but he didn’t, and so she let herself relax a little more into the sofa.
“You’re right,” he went on, his voice muffled by his hands. “I am squeezing the life out of everyone I love, and I can’t seem to stop myself.”
Casey rubbed his back. “It’s gonna be okay, bruv,” she soothed. She hoped.
“I think I need to go back to therapy.” Nate sniffled, and she passed him a tissue.
“Yeah,” she said.
“I didn’t call Theresa.”
“I figured.”
“I didn’t want her to know that I wasn’t doing so well.” He sniffed.
“That’s kind of the point of a therapist, you big nincompoop.”
Nate gave a watery laugh. “Yeah.” They were quiet for a time and then he said, “So, this is what rock bottom looks like. Don’t like it much.”
Casey smiled. “Now’s probably a good time to start working your way back up, then, huh?”
—
The siblings sat together while Nate called his therapist and made an appointment, and then Sylvie—a woman with an almost uncanny sixth sense—arrived with a Le Creuset Dutch oven dish filled with soup and a heart full of love and sent Nate back up to the house with strict instructions to “Take a shower; you smell like a stale towel.”
When he was safely inside the house, Sylvie turned to Casey.
“He’ll be okay,” she reassured her with a confident nod.
“We’ll make sure of it. We’ve been worried about him for a while, but Ken said we needed to let him realize it for himself first. He’s very wise, my husband—for a man.
There’s no helping a person who doesn’t think they need help. ”
“I feel guilty that I hadn’t realized how bad he’d got.”
“He puts on a good front. Sometimes the closer you are to someone, the easier it is to miss the signs. Now, you sleep. I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“Thanks, Sylvie, I really appreciate it.”
Sylvie tsked. “You don’t thank family; caring is part of the deal.
” Then she smacked a kiss on Casey’s forehead and made her way back up the garden path to the house, where no doubt she would mother Nate to within an inch of his life.
This certainty was enough to soothe some of Casey’s anxiety, so that when she finally collapsed into her bed just before lunchtime, physically and emotionally exhausted, she was able to slip into a mercifully dreamless sleep.