I poked her foot with mine, too bloated and heavy to move. ‘This has been a magnificent feast. Thank you.’
‘Oh, you’re welcome,’ she smiled, rubbing her tummy. ‘Now, Sarah, I shouldn’t have a drink, but you must try some pink fizz, OK?’
I eyed the bottle and felt a strong, physical sense of dread. ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘Thank you, darling, but I got a bit too drunk with Jo last week and I haven’t been able to face booze since.’
‘Seriously?’ Jenni looked shocked. ‘Not even a little glass?’
But I couldn’t do it. Not even for her.
Then I told her everything. Even the awful bits at the football ground when, at the same moment that I’d been confronted by a stranger’s backside, I had also been confronted with the immutable fact that I had lost my mind. Jenni awwwed and tutted and sighed and even, when I showed her my final message to Eddie, welled up. She did not mock me for any of it. She did not even raise an eyebrow. She just nodded sympathetically, as if my actions had been entirely understandable.
‘You can’t let a shot at love slip through your fingers,’ she said. ‘You were right to try everything.’ She eyed me. ‘You did fall in love with him, didn’t you?’
After a pause I nodded. ‘Although you shouldn’t be able to fall in love after only—’
‘Oh, quit it,’ Jenni said quietly. ‘Of course you can fall in love after a week.’
‘I suppose so.’ I picked at the hem of my top. ‘Anyway, I want to get back to what I know. I want to win that hospice pitch in Fresno; I want to get George Attwood on board in Santa Ana. It’s time to move on.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. There’ll be no further attempts to reach Eddie. In fact, I’m going to remove him from my Facebook friends. Right now, with you as witness.’
‘Oh,’ Jenni said, unenthusiastically. ‘I suppose that’s for the best. But it’s so sad. I thought he was it, Sarah.’
‘Me too.’
‘To have met him on that date, in that place – it was just so perfect. It sent shivers down my spine.’
I said nothing. I’d been trying to forget what Tommy had had to say on this matter. Jenni’s explanation, on the other hand, was more comforting. A big, romantic coincidence; an incredible piece of timing. That worked for me.
I glanced over at her. ‘You OK?’
She sighed, nodded. ‘Just sad for you. And full of hormones.’
I flopped back down next to her as I waited for Facebook to locate Eddie from within my friends list.
My stomach turned over.
‘He’s unfriended me,’ I whispered. I reloaded his profile, in case it told me a different story. It did not. Add friend? it asked.
‘Oh, Sarah,’ Jenni murmured.
The freezing pain returned to my chest, as if it had never gone away. The bottomless longing, a well down which a pebble could fall forever.
‘I . . .’ I swallowed hard. ‘I guess that’s that, then.’
At that moment Frappuccino exploded into life as the front door opened and Javier strode in. ‘Hey, Sarah!’ he said, offering the weird salute he always offered in place of a hug. Javier did physical only with Jenni and cars.
‘Hey, Javier. How are you? Thank you so much for giving us some time alone tonight.’ My body felt droopy and unformed.
‘You’re welcome,’ he told me, mooching off to the kitchen for a beer. Jenni kissed him and passed through to the bathroom.
‘You been looking after my girl?’ he asked. He sat down in his chair and opened the beer.
‘Well, she’s mostly been looking after me,’ I admitted. ‘You know what she’s like. But I’ll be here for her tomorrow, Javi. I can be here all day if she needs me.’
Javier took a long swig of his beer, watching me with guarded eyes. ‘Tomorrow?’
I looked at him. Something wasn’t right. ‘Er . . . yes,’ I said. ‘For the test result?’
Javier put his beer bottle down on the floor, and I knew, suddenly, what he was going to say.
‘The test was today,’ he said shortly. ‘It didn’t work. She’s not pregnant.’
Silence echoed between us.
‘I guess she wanted you to be able to talk about your own . . . ah, problems . . . first,’ he said. ‘You know how she is.’
‘Oh . . . Oh God,’ I whispered. ‘Javi. I’m so sorry. I . . . Oh God, why did I believe her? I knew it was today.’
I glanced at the kitchen door. ‘How’s she been?’
He shrugged, but his face told me all I needed to know. He was lost. Out of his depth. For years, there had remained avenues of hope, and keeping Jenni plugged into them had been Javier’s job. It had shielded him from the lead weight of her fear, given him an active role. Now, there was nothing, and his wife – whom, for all his emotional limitations, he loved with every cell in his body – was in a deep well of grief. He no longer had a role, or any hope to offer.
‘She has not said too much. Silence in the clínica . I don’t think she is letting herself think about it. Not yet, anyhow. I thought she would tell you and then she would cry, let her emotions come, you know? That’s why I went out. Normally when she can’t talk to me, she talks to you.’
‘Oh no. Oh, Javi, I am so sorry.’
He swigged his beer and sank back into his chair, staring out of the window.
I looked over at the door. Still nothing. The clock on their kitchen wall ticked, bomb-like.
Several minutes passed.
‘She went to the bathroom on purpose,’ I said suddenly. ‘To hide. She knew you’d tell me. We should . . . we should go and get her.’ I got up, but Javier was already up. He strode across the kitchen floor, shoulders hunched.
I hovered uselessly in the kitchen as he knocked at the bathroom door. ‘Baby?’ he called. ‘Baby, let me in . . .’
After a pause the door opened and I heard it: the desperate sound of his wife, my loyal friend, who’d postponed her own grief so she could look after mine, gasping for breath as tears and despair erupted savagely from within. ‘I can’t bear it,’ she wept. ‘I can’t bear it. Javi, I don’t know what to do.’
Then the unbearable sound of raw human misery, muffled only by the flimsy cotton of her husband’s shirt.
Chapter Thirty
When the hysterics had finally subsided, Jenni had sat on the couch between me and Javier and methodically binged her way through everything we hadn’t already eaten. I’d ignored the scream of jet-lag tiredness and stayed with her until midnight, eating the odd sliver of cake to keep myself awake.
Now morning was here: the bright hot morning of which I’d dreamed, my first back in LA. During my final week in England I’d become certain that this first morning would bring with it renewal and hope: a sense of perspective I’d been unable to find in London or Gloucestershire. I would be happy. Purposeful.
In reality I was bloated and uncomfortable, and far too cold after a night with the air-conditioning at super-freezing. I curled up in Jenni’s spare bed, too exhausted to get out and turn it down. I stared at myself in the mirror across the room. I looked puffy, white, unwell. Before even realizing what I was doing, I reached out to check my phone in case Eddie had replied to my farewell message. He hadn’t, of course, and my heart ballooned with pain.
Add friend? Facebook asked, when I looked at his profile. Just to check. Add friend ?
An hour later, still awaiting serenity, I left the house for a run. It wasn’t yet eight, and Jenni and Javier – for once – were still in bed.
I knew that running wasn’t kind, after a transatlantic flight and an evening of emotional tumult. Not to mention the sleepless night I’d had in London the night before, or that the thermometer on Jenni’s deck was already scorching its way to a hundred degrees. But I couldn’t sit still. Couldn’t be with myself. I needed to move so fast that nothing could stick to me.
I had to run.
Three hundred metres down Glendale Avenue, I remembered why I didn’t run in this city. I swayed on the corner of Temple, pretending to stretch out my quads so I could grab a lamp post. The heat was suffocating. I looked up at the sun, soupy and indistinct today behind a smear of marine haze, and shook my head. I had to run!