At 1.30 a.m. I decided to use this surfeit of energy to attempt some work. My colleagues had been too polite to say anything, but I knew I’d have someone on the phone if I didn’t process the backlog soon.
I got back into bed and opened my emails. And my brain – finally – ignited. I made big decisions; I made small decisions. I authorized spends and sent a report to our trustees. I checked our webmail folder, because nobody ever remembered to check it, and found an email from a little girl asking if some of our clowns could visit her twin sister, who was very sick in a hospital in San Diego. Of course! I wrote, forwarding the email to Reuben and Kate, my deputy. Send in the clowns! It’s a hospital we know! Let’s have our guys in there by Friday, please, team !
By three in the morning I realized that my brain was running at a speed I didn’t like.
By four I felt quite mad.
At a quarter past four I decided to call Jenni. Jenni Carmichael would know what to do.
‘Sarah Mackey!’ she said. I could hear the soaring violins of an old romantic film in the background. ‘What the hell are you doing awake at this time of night?’
Thank you , I thought, closing my eyes. Thank you, God, for my dear Jenni Carmichael.
My wedding to Reuben had been something of an embarrassment. His side of the congregation was full, whereas mine contained only Mum, Dad, Tommy, Jo and a couple of waitresses from the cafe on Fountain where Reuben and I had held our first charity meetings. No Hannah. Just a silent space on the bench next to Mum. And no friends either, because nobody in England knew what to say to me anymore, let alone wanted to fly across the world for the pleasure of still not knowing what to say.
I’d told Reuben’s family that ‘none of my English friends could make it’ and shame had sloshed all over me like beer from an overfull glass.
Reuben and I had a beautiful honeymoon in Yosemite. Hidden away in a bell jar of love, we were happy. But when towards the end of the trip we found ourselves in San Francisco, surrounded by laughing groups of young people, my friendlessness had taunted me again.
Then Jenni had arrived in my life, as if shipped in by courier. Jenni was from South Carolina. She had no interest in the film industry, unlike most out-of-towners: she just ‘wanted to try something new’. While Reuben and I were wandering around northern California as newlyweds, Jenni was being installed as the manager of the office building where Reuben and I rented a desk, a grey concrete block crouching in the shadow of the Hollywood Freeway.
Upon our return, she had come to ask me if we were planning to pay our overdue desk rental anytime soon. I handed over cash and apologies the very same day, hovering guiltily beside her as she counted the dollar bills. On her desk I noted half a cake wrapped in cling film and a small CD player on which she was playing what sounded like a ‘Greatest Love Songs’ compilation. She glanced up at me and smiled as she thumbed through the money with a rubber thimble. ‘I suck at numbers,’ she said. ‘I’m counting the bills to look efficient.’ She went back to the beginning of the pile twice before giving up.
‘I’ll trust you,’ she said, putting the money in a cash box. ‘You look honest. Would you like some cake? I baked it last night. I’m scared I’m going to eat the whole damned thing.’
The cake was outstanding, and as I ate it by her desk, Jenni recounted her interview with the very strange man who owned the building. She did a near-perfect impression of him. I want her to be my friend, I thought, as she skipped a modern power ballad in favour of Barbra Streisand. She was nothing like me, or anyone I’d ever known, and I liked her all the more for it.
I’d have got there. I’d have found friends eventually. I still carried the scars of my past but was emerging already as Sarah Mackey, charity executive: pleasant, ultra-reliable, sometimes witty. But Jenni Carmichael was the conduit; through her I began to meet people, to believe that I could belong here in this city I so needed to call home.
Three years later Jenni had become not only a firm friend but a valuable asset to our charity. When Reuben and I signed a long lease on a building on Vermont, just two blocks down from the Children’s Hospital, she quit her job and came with us. Our new HQ wasn’t much to look at, surrounded by dicey-looking medical clinics, coin laundries and takeaways, but the rent was low, and it had a big, open ground floor that would become Reuben’s training academy for new Clown-doctors. She came first as our office manager, then as ‘someone who helped with grants’, until eventually, after several years, we made her our VP of fundraising.
A year or so after we met, she had forged her own perfect love story and now lived happily on the edge of Westlake and Historic Filipinotown with a man called Javier, who fixed wealthy folks’ SUVs and bought her flowers every week. She lived for their romantic getaways and talked about Javier as if he were God Himself.
They had been trying for a baby for eleven years. She refused to complain, because complaining was not something she had much time for, but it was killing her. Slowly, and from the inside, it was destroying my friend. For her I had even prayed to a god I’d never believed in. Please give her a baby. It’s all she wants.
If this final round of IVF didn’t work out, I had no idea what she’d do. Neither she nor Javier had the money to fund treatment once her insurers had stopped paying out. ‘Last-chance saloon!’ she’d said stoutly, when we hugged goodbye at LAX.
Jenni had been shocked by my break with Reuben. I think it shattered her assumptions about love: sure, people divorced all the time, but not those in her immediate life. She got round it by taking on the role of rescuer, for which she’d been designed. She downloaded apps to my phone, moved me into her spare room and made a vast number of cakes.
‘So!’ she said now. ‘Eddie reached out to you, right? Everything’s back on track?’
‘Actually, no,’ I said. ‘It’s the opposite. He’s back in the world – assuming he went anywhere in the first place – but he’s not replied to any of my messages. He’s cut me dead.’
‘Hang on, honey.’ I heard the music stop. ‘Just pausing my movie. Javier, I’m just gonna take this call out on the deck.’ I heard the screen door snap shut behind her. ‘Sorry, Sarah, could you repeat all of that?’
I repeated all of that. Jenni perhaps needed a moment to take on board that my second shot at a love story had gone up in flames.
‘Oh shit.’ Jenni never swore. ‘Really? ’
‘Really. I’m a bit of a mess. As you can probably tell, it being gone four in the morning over here.’
‘Oh shit,’ she said again, and I laughed bleakly. ‘Tell me everything that’s happened since we last messaged. And step away from that computer, too. You’ve sent some crazy messages in the last few hours.’
I told her everything that had happened.
‘So that’s it,’ I said, when I got to the end. ‘I think I’m probably going to have to let him go.’
‘No,’ she said, a little too sharply. Jenni didn’t like seeing anyone turn their back on love. ‘Don’t you dare give up. Look, Sarah, I know most folks’ll be telling you to leave that man well alone, but . . . I can’t give up on him yet. I’m as certain as you are that there’s an explanation.’
I smiled briefly. ‘Such as?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly. ‘But I’m determined to get to the bottom of it.’
‘So was I.’
She laughed. ‘We’ll figure it out. For now, hang on in there, OK? Which reminds me – how’re you feeling about tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow? ’
‘Your meeting with Reuben and Kaia. At some film place by the River Thames, right?’
‘Reuben’s in London? With his new girlfriend? ’
‘Uh . . . yes? He said he’d emailed to set up coffee tomorrow. Introduce you to Kaia, so you don’t meet for the first time back home in Cali.’
‘But why is she in London? Why are either of them in London? I’m meant to be going back to Gloucestershire tomorrow! I— What? ’
‘Kaia wanted to come,’ Jenni said helplessly. ‘She’s hasn’t been to London in years. And Reuben already had a flight to London for your vacation together . . .’