Eddie folded his arms. ‘That’s very odd,’ he said slowly. ‘But there’s absolutely no way it was Mum. She hasn’t the faintest clue about you. And anyway, she . . .’ He trailed off. ‘She’s just not capable of that sort of thing. Crank-calling, following people – that’s just way beyond her capabilities. She’d get super-stressed even thinking about doing something like that. In fact, she’d fall apart.’
‘And there’s nobody else it could have been?’
Eddie looked utterly confused. ‘No,’ he said, and I believed him. ‘The only person I told was my best mate, Alan, and his wife, Gia. Oh, and Martin from football, because he also saw your post on my Facebook page. But all of them I told in confidence.’
He leaned forward, his face knotted with concentration. He must have failed to get anywhere, though, because after a few minutes he shrugged and straightened up. ‘I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘But it wasn’t Mum. Of that you can be certain.’
‘OK.’ I slid off a flip-flop and tucked one foot up on my chair. Eddie was looking miserable again. He pressed a finger down onto the rim of his plate so it reared up like a flying saucer. He wheeled it left and right.
‘Why are you here, Eddie?’ I asked, eventually. ‘Why did you come?’
He looked at me then. Looked at me fully, and my stomach pulled up into my throat.
‘I came because you messaged me saying you were going back to LA and I panicked. I was still angry, but I just couldn’t let you walk out of my life. Not until I’d spoken to you. Heard what you had to say. I knew Mum’s view couldn’t be the only view.’
‘I see.’
‘I booked a flight and emailed my mate Nathan to ask if I could crash at his place. Called my aunt and asked her to come and stay with Mum. It was like watching myself in the third person, really. I knew I shouldn’t come, but I couldn’t stop myself. And I couldn’t stop you, either: you were already on the plane when you emailed me.’
But when he got here, he found himself paralysed. Three times he came to confront me; three times guilt over his sister sent him running back into the obscurity of the city. I slumped in my chair. Even talking to me felt like a betrayal.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about your past?’ he asked, when I signalled for the bill. ‘You told me so much about yourself. Why didn’t you ever mention what happened?’
I pulled some cash out of my wallet. ‘I just don’t tell people, full stop. The last person I told was my friend Jenni, and that was seventeen years ago. If we . . . Had we . . .’ I cleared my throat. ‘If we had turned into a Thing, I would have told you. I nearly did, in fact, on the last night. But other things got in the way.’
Eddie looked thoughtful. ‘Whereas I’m used to telling people. I often have to, because of Mum being so up and down. But that week with you just felt so different to anything else. I wasn’t Eddie, Carole’s son, the bloke who lost his sister and has to spend far too much time running around after his mum. I was me.’ He slid his phone back in his pocket. ‘For the first time in years, I didn’t think about the past. At all. Plus Mum had her sister with her, because I was about to go off to Spain, so I didn’t even need to think about her.’
He stood up, giving me an odd smile. ‘Which is ironic, really, given who I was with.’
I left a few dollars on the table and we walked down to the water’s edge. Wavelets furled silkily around our feet, drawing back into the boundless blue swell of the Pacific. The horizon boiled and shimmered, indistinct.
I slipped my hand into my pocket. Mouse. I ran a thumb over her, one final time, before offering her over to Eddie on the palm of my hand.
He stared at her for a long time. ‘I made her for Alex,’ he said. ‘For her second birthday. Mouse was the first decent thing I made out of wood.’
With tenderness, he picked her up, holding her in front of his face, as if learning her shape once again. I imagined him chiselling away at this tiny lump of wood, maybe in his father’s garage, or simply at a kitchen table, and my heart broke. A round-faced little boy making a toy mouse for his baby sister.
‘Alex thought Mouse was a hedgehog, when she was a toddler. Only she couldn’t say “hedgehog” back then: it came out as “Ej-oj”. Made me laugh. I started calling her Hedgehog; it never quite wore off.’ He fitted her back onto his key ring and put it back in his pocket.
I had run out of delaying tactics. The sea shifted in and out. Neither of us said anything.
We watched herring gulls and sandpipers circling above a family picnic, and a wave tumbled in on us, faster than we could move back. His shorts got wet. My skirt got wet. We laughed, he lost his footing and nearly fell, and for a second I could smell him: his skin, his clean hair, his Eddie smell.
‘I’m going to fly back tomorrow,’ he said, eventually. ‘I’m glad we’ve had this conversation, but I’m not sure there’s anything else we can say. Or do, for that matter.’
No, I thought hopelessly. No! You can’t walk away from us! It’s here! Our thing! It’s right here in the air between us!
But nothing came out of my mouth, because it wasn’t my decision to make. I had driven a car carrying Alex into a tree and she had died, right there beside me. Time would not change that. Nothing would change that.
He picked up my hands and uncurled my clenched fists. My nails left sad white crescents in my palms. ‘We could never go back to what we had the first time round,’ he said, smoothing his thumb across the nail marks, like a father rubbing a child’s cut knee. ‘It’s done. You do understand that, Sarah, don’t you?’
I nodded and made a face that suggested agreement, or perhaps resignation. He dropped my hands and looked off at the sea for a while. Then, without any warning at all, he bent down and kissed me.
It took me a while to believe it was happening. That his face was pressed against mine, his mouth, his warmth, his breath, just like I’d imagined a hundred times over. For a few seconds I was perfectly still. But then I started kissing him back, elated, and he wrapped his arms tightly around me, like he had the first time. He kissed me harder, and I kissed him back, and the wheeling gulls and shrieking children were gone.
But as I began to let go completely, he stopped, resting his chin on my head. I could hear his breath, fast and unsteady.
Then: ‘Goodbye, Sarah,’ he said. ‘Take good care of yourself.’
His arms released me and he was gone.
I watched him walk away, my hands dangling by my sides. Further and further away he walked. Further and further away.
It wasn’t until he was back up on the boardwalk that I said out loud the thing I’d been unable to say before now, not even to myself.
‘I’m pregnant, Eddie,’ I said, and my words were carried away by the wind, just like I wanted them to be.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
I laid a hand on my belly. I am pregnant. I am carrying a baby .
Jenni was telling Javier about a Slovenian genetics researcher she’d met in the waiting room at the acupuncture clinic yesterday. Javier was listening attentively to his wife while keeping a keen ear on the lady dispensing orders at the counter. The last number she’d called had been eighty-four. Our ticket, curled between Javier’s fingers, said eighty-seven.
I imagined cells multiplying, all those weeks ago. Sarah cells, Eddie cells. Sarah-and-Eddie cells, splitting into more Sarah-and-Eddie cells. The Internet said it would be the size of a strawberry by now. There was a computer-generated picture on the page, and it looked like a tiny child. I’d stared at that picture for what seemed like hours, and felt things I had never felt before, things to which I couldn’t even put a name.
I am nine weeks pregnant.
But we’d been careful! Each and every time! And how could I be pregnant when I was three pounds lighter?
‘You told me yourself you’ve struggled to eat,’ the doctor had said patiently. ‘Weight loss is not uncommon with morning sickness.’
Nausea. Fatigue. Tumbling hormones, food aversions, a brain packed with thick fog. The real surprise, I supposed, was not so much that I was pregnant but that I had failed to spot so many obvious markers.