Chapter Thirty-Two
Allie
I have tried to continue on as normal since Milo left three days ago. I’ve written up research. I’ve chatted at mealtimes. I’ve showered. I even joined a few new arrivals tonight at dinner – talked, joined in on card games, playing the role of someone whose heart isn’t breaking.
Inside, I feel like my chest is caving in.
I know it’ll pass with time.
But here, in the silent, dim computer room, where it all happened, the screen painting my skin indigo, I realise .
. . it feels like there is a hole in my chest because there is.
You are not supposed to fall in love and then walk in the opposite direction.
That is not the natural order of things.
You’re supposed to fall in. It’s like my heart is a little lost auk and it’s flying away from its nest – away from its mate and safe, perfect little egg.
I swallow down a tornado of tears forming in my throat.
I stare at my computer screen.
Everything seems so quiet now Milo and Jameson have gone.
Lars has even gone home for a couple of weeks.
A beer festival and to meet his new grandchild (in that order).
Polly and Iris are still here, which is a comfort, but it all feels so quiet and bleak.
A new team assembling in the cafeteria, Milo and Jameson’s dorm room now dark, the beds stripped.
I click onto my emails. Nothing. I keep typing an email to Sian, but I just end up deleting the words.
Even Count Your Chicks is quiet and that’s usually a cosy source of home for me.
Grey offline dots next to my regular users, SunshineGirl23, Magic_Garrett, AcerSpark make new dread settle in my stomach.
It feels like since Milo left, my world is slowly coming to a close.
A pair of curtains slowly drawing on a casket, marking our denouement.
Gah. That’s dramatic especially for me. Bet Milo would love that word.
Denouement. I take out my phone and type it down.
Maybe I’ll add it to the Word! app later.
I can’t imagine, though, doing anything that isn’t just surviving right now. Even opening an app feels like effort.
Work.
I’ll do some work.
I open up a Word document. The world doesn’t stop for heartbreak.
I learned that a long time ago. Too long ago, and too young.
Dad begging Mum in tears. The tears turning to rage.
Mum walking away, double locking the front door and opening a box of fish fingers while drying her eyes, making our dinner with oven timers and novelty plates, smiling at us through watery eyes as we told her what was on Nickelodeon.
Gosh, I miss her. Being here, in the arctic, has helped me grieve Mum.
The quietness away from the real world really allowed me to process – well, start to, anyway – losing her.
But I miss her. With more warmth now, with more gratitude at having known what it was to be loved by her, than anger and injustice, but, I miss her with the same ferocity.
Especially in moments like this. I’d give anything to bury my face into her jumpered shoulder now, have her cradle the back of my head like she used to, sway me gently. She always, always knew what to say.
I type. Upon arrival at Cote Rock, Colony 1, we . . .
I stop.
I think about that day with Lucky and Mart.
I think about Milo and that smile. That feeling I had, fleetingly, of knowing he was what I wanted.
I wanted to share these moments with him.
The puffins getting back together. The true joy on his face.
Nobody has ever cared that much for my joy. Pure second-hand joy.
‘Isn’t it just the most perfect sight?’
‘I think seeing you this happy is.’
Tears push their way through my eyes. Why didn’t he just tell me the truth?
It isn’t the addiction. He might not believe it, but I felt ready to love all those parts of him, even the ones he was too afraid to show me.
Heights and pink shirts. Crochet. His word-nerding.
The struggles he faced; the ones he’s ashamed of.
I wish I could’ve been there. I hate knowing he might’ve been in emotional pain when we spoke back then and had nowhere to release it.
But my phone – sober, awake, lucid Milo would’ve made the decision to take my phone with him that night before the horrid claws of addiction dragged him back into its lair.
Milo knew he’d betrayed my trust in that way – Julia said they all knew about us, were all jealous – and he didn’t tell me.
Even when I asked him. I wish he had. I wish he had said something in the cabin.
Just tried to say something. Anything. I might’ve found it hard, but I would’ve understood.
Two knocks tap on the computer room door. I clear my throat, turn my face away, but before I can call out for them to come in, they do anyway. It’s Iris.
I don’t feel comfortable crying in front of even myself, but Iris is an exception.
She’s seen me cry. A lot, after the Milo leak.
A lot, after June House went up for sale and Mum, Sian and I, three people who had grown together within those walls – late-night kitchen conversations, bringing towels to the bathroom door for each other, folding each other’s clothes – were suddenly nothing but boxes.
And at the sight of her, I feel like I could cry again.
‘Oh, mate.’
Iris crosses the floor. She’s wearing pyjamas, as ever, and has her hair in what she calls her ‘heatless curl sausage’. Iris cried with me when their chopper left. ‘I’m sorry,’ she kept saying. ‘We really wanted this to work. I know you’re angry at me. I know. I deserve it.’
I am still mad. Just a little, knowing I was kept in the dark.
Especially now it’s ended like this. But I understand why she wanted to do it.
I’m so stubborn, Iris would’ve never been able to talk me into even a single conversation with Milo.
Her heart was, of course, in the very best of places.
Which ironically, put mine in the worst.
‘I’m still so sorry,’ she says. ‘I feel like . . . I had this vision, this hope for it—’
‘It’s fine,’ I say flatly, even though nothing is fine.
‘It’s not.’ She pauses, breathes heavily. ‘It’s been a fuck-ton, my friend. And I feel responsible.’
‘Iris,’ I say. ‘I promise. I understand.’
She doesn’t put the lights on and I’m grateful for it.
It’s just the glow of my computer screen illuminating the room, and the polar night, bright as ever, shut behind roller blinds.
She pulls up a chair and sits next to me.
She rests her chin on my shoulder and reads the first line on the screen – the only line.
The room smells like warm computer towers and the sweet cherry of Iris’s hand cream.
For a while, we sit in silence. I’ve never needed an anchor.
Not really. I’ve always been my own anchor.
But a mate, I need, definitely. And that’s what Iris is.
I sail my ship, but it’s nice to have a mate next to me.
Mum was a shipmate too. I always wanted Sian to be, and although she’d get on board, I always felt she had other places she’d rather be.
I’m sure Sian would say the same about me.
We’re different, I suppose. She’d say I was serious and analytical, best-foot-forward at all costs.
I’d say she was artistic, running before she could walk into her whole life. A marketer’s dream.
‘I think I might love him,’ I say, and the words come out of nowhere. Something about this safe dimly lit room, with Iris, makes me feel I’m cocooned in a safe moment I can say anything in.
Iris nods. No fanfare. No squealing.
‘What am I going to do, Iris?’
‘Do you want to know what I really think?’
I nod, and she takes my hand and folds it into hers, at her waist. It feels safe. The smell of her laundry detergent, her weird hair-sausage, her glittering eyes, her pyjamas covered in snowmen.
‘I think you’ve been hiding. I know this place is safety, and I know it’s served such an important purpose, and in return, so have you.
But you’ve been hiding, amigo. You build all these walls around you, and so high that you convince yourself the world is just that small, and that small world is perfect, cheers very much. ’
She gives me the warmest smile, then. A smile that tells me she loves me for that, for every wall I’ve built, even the ones she’d rather crumbled.
‘When, in reality,’ Iris continues, ‘the real world is still there, you’ve just blocked it out. And, eventually, shutting yourself away, to keep yourself safe, harms you anyway, in the end.’
I look up at her, a warm tear trickles down my face.
‘I think you need to go home,’ she says. ‘I think you need a break. And I think you need to finally speak to Sian. She needs you too. I know you don’t think she does. But she wanted to help. She said she could help, with the leak stuff. The answers.’
‘But we already know the answers.’
She takes a deep breath, and I can tell by the way her eyes drop to her lap that she’s nervous to say her next sentence. I’m so wrung out, I hardly react.
‘She said she knows something about your diary.’
‘My diary?’ I ask. ‘That she read it? I know she read it. Everyone read it—’
‘No.’ Iris shakes her head slowly. I hear her swallow in the gloom. ‘No,’ she says. ‘She . . . she sort of says she knows how they were leaked.’
‘But we know someone from that night did—’
‘But we always said the diaries weren’t easily accessible on your phone. Plus, you moved them to a new drive, anyway. Remember? To be safe.’
I stare at Iris.
‘I think she did something,’ she says, solidly and confidently, like she’s had a lot of time to mull this over and to make a good guess, and she’s confident to press forward accordingly.
‘Do you really?’ Even though I know what Iris is hinting at, I feel so numb, it doesn’t really hit me. Sian. Really? Why would Sian leak my diaries?
‘Yes,’ says Iris. ‘And I think you need to go home and find out. Start closing the chapter on this, Allie. So when your heart’s mended, you can finally start another. Don’t you think, whatever happens, that it’s time?’