Lessons in Heartbreak (18 page)

‘Well, no.’

This time, she sat up and pulled the sheet protectively over her breasts.

‘Oh, come on, Joe,’ she said. ‘It’s not rocket science. You’re one of the smartest people I know. Surely you can figure it out.’

‘You wanted to look at my wife?’

He couldn’t say her name: couldn’t say ‘Elizabeth’
. As if saying it here in Izzie’s apartment would taint her. Elizabeth was the one to be protected, not the other way round.

Izzie shivered at what this meant.

‘I could look at her in any magazine, Joe,’ she said calmly. ‘I wanted to see you
together
– don’t you get it? You and her, together. Wouldn’t you want to see me and him together, if I was the one who was married?’ she asked incredulously.

‘If you were married, we wouldn’t be together,’ Joe said bluntly.

‘What?’

‘I wouldn’t want to share you.’ He shrugged. ‘That wouldn’t be an option. I’d never see someone who was involved with anyone else.’

Rage boiled up inside her.

‘You bastard!’ she hissed. ‘I get to share you, but you’d refuse to share me. You are so hypocritical.’

‘Me, hypocritical? I don’t think so.’ Joe’s eyes were like cold steel and they bored into her.

Izzie was shocked by the ferocity of his glare.

‘What I didn’t think we were getting into was you turning up like a stalker to watch me and my wife with our friends.’

His words actually hurt her physically. She hadn’t known words could do that.

‘I can’t believe you’re saying this to me,’ she said. She no longer felt angry, just very scared and very shocked. This was not how it was supposed to be. Where was the Joe who’d looked down on her as they’d made love, as if he’d like to gaze at her face with love for ever.

The words just slipped out. ‘I thought you loved me?’

The silence gaped like one of the valleys near the New Mexico pueblo where she’d been just days before. Outside, police cars roared past, droning sirens into the afternoon.

‘I thought you and Elizabeth were just together for the kids? That’s what you told me. Is that the truth or not?’

‘Izzie –’ he began, ‘I do love you, but it’s not that simple.’

And then she knew for sure. Carla had been right. He hadn’t loved her. He’d loved making love to her, sure, but as for the Real Thing – that was all one-sided. Her side.

‘Don’t say anything.’ She scrambled out of the bed, dragging the sheet with her, wrapping it around her body like an Egyptian mummy. She didn’t want him looking at her naked
body ever again. She felt so ashamed: ashamed, humiliated, stupid. He’d used her. She loved him, thought he loved her too. But she was wrong.

‘Let’s not fight,’ he said gently. ‘I didn’t come here for that.’

The shred of dignity left to Izzie stopped her saying:
What did you come here for, then?
Because the answer was simple: to fuck you, my handy little girlfriend. That’s all she was. A convenience store – available for late-night drinks, dinner and free sex. For the first time ever, she had respect for the hard-boiled identikit New York girlfriends of married men. At least they understood the rules of the game and they considered it a profession. Get your man and get something from him. She’d considered herself different: his true love. She was his equal and she wasn’t the sort of woman who wanted
things
from a man. She wasn’t in it for gifts – she was in it for love. Except he was in it for something different. No shit, Sherlock.

‘No,’ she said, reaching inside herself and finding one last thread of calmness. ‘Let’s not fight. I have to pack.’

Pack? She didn’t care if she travelled on the flight without a single item of luggage but the clothes she stood up in. Still, it was a good excuse.

‘Of course,’ he said, sliding gracefully out of the bed. He was such a handsome male animal, she thought, watching him. Everything she found physically attractive: no fat, just hard muscle and a hard business brain, and now – she’d just found out – a hard heart.

‘What time is your flight?’ he murmured.

‘Five forty tomorrow evening,’ she said.

‘Nothing earlier.’

‘No.’

‘If you want, I could get you on the private plane,’ he said.

Like a computer finally downloading a big email, the litany of vicious things she’d planned to say earlier came online in Izzie’s brain. The thread of calm vanished.

‘But not the company plane, right? That might really let people know that you were screwing me. No, you’d have to take a favour from someone or else pay to fly me home, because God forbid that any of your employees should find out about me, the boss’s whore.’

‘Izzie,’ he said, sounding hurt, ‘I never made you feel that way, I never meant to.’

‘I know, but that’s still how I feel,’ she said.

‘Guess we’re fighting after all.’

‘No, you’re leaving,’ she said. ‘In fact, I am too. I’ve got things to buy.’ She grabbed a sweatshirt and sweatpants from her closet and went into the tiny bathroom. Twenty seconds later, she emerged, wearing the tracksuit and her hair messy from where she’d hauled it over her head. Who cared about her hair? Bed-hair and life-is-over-hair looked pretty much the same. ‘I’m going. You can let yourself out.’

‘Don’t go,’ he said urgently.

‘Tough, I’m going,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to wait here and listen to more of your lies.’

‘They’re not lies, Izzie. I love you, it’s just difficult now. Complicated –’

‘I’ll undo some of the complications, then,’ she snapped. ‘Consider me out of your life, Joe. Does that make it easier?’

She snagged her purse from the hall, grabbed her keys and was gone.

She ran down the stairs to the street in case he came after her, and then ran two blocks to a coffee shop they’d never been to together, just in case he came after her.

But he wouldn’t, she realised, as she stood at the counter and tried to summon up the brainpower to actually order something.

‘Er…skinny latte, please,’ she said to the barista.

Joe wouldn’t follow her. He didn’t want an emotional girlfriend who had expectations: he wanted an easy lay who
wouldn’t cause trouble. Or did he? She’d trusted him, had been sure he was telling the truth. But if he was, and if he loved her, wouldn’t he walk away now to be with her?

She sat at a table and stirred sugar into her latte. What a hideous day this had turned out to be. First, darling Gran: now, this.

‘Oh, Gran,’ she said to herself, ‘I’ve let you down so much. Let both of us down, actually. Bet you thought you’d taught me better, huh?’

A mother with a baby in a stroller and several bags of groceries underneath, sat tiredly down at the table beside her. Izzie watched the mother and child sadly.
She’d
never have that, not now. Motherhood was a destination getting further and further away from her. Once, she’d thought it was a right, inevitable. Women got married and had children. Then, it became a challenge: harder than originally thought, but still possible. And now…now it looked impossible, unless she went it alone.

Suddenly, she could understand women who reached forty and went looking for donor sperm to father their babies. If there was no man on the scene to be your baby’s daddy, and the time bomb that was worn-out ovaries was ticking away, what else did you do? Wait like Sleeping Beauty for a non-existent prince? Or save yourself.

The baby wriggled in her stroller and Izzie caught sight of her properly. Downy African-American curls framed an exquisite face with chubby cheeks and huge dark eyes like inky pools. In her peachy pink sleepsuit, she looked like a little doll.

‘She’s lovely,’ Izzie said to the tired mom, who instantly brightened.

‘Yeah, isn’t she? My little princess.’

‘Does she sleep?’

What Izzie knew about small children could be written on the head of a pin with room left over for the State of the Union
speech, but she knew that sleep patterns were as important to mothers as New York Fashion Week was to her.

‘She’s getting better,’ the mother said, warming to her theme. ‘She went six whole hours last night, didn’t you, honey?’ she cooed to her baby. ‘You got kids?’ she asked Izzie.

Izzie felt the prickle of tears in her eyes.

She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said.

‘Not everyone wants ‘em,’ the woman agreed.

Izzie nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak. She pushed her barely touched latte away from her. ‘Bye,’ she gulped and ran out.

It was too late for her to have a baby, she thought, wild with grief. It wasn’t that her eggs were too old or that her body was too decrepit: it was that her heart was a dried-out husk and you couldn’t nourish another human being when there was nothing left in you.

‘Don’t go yet, Gran,’ she whispered up to the Manhattan sky. ‘Please don’t go yet. I need to see you one last time, please.’

Izzie’s in-control façade had stayed in place throughout the entire flight, the roller-coaster turbulence of their descent into Dublin airport, and the long march through the glass hallways of the airport to the baggage reclaim.

She travelled so much for business that she could adopt her woman-business-traveller look easily. With her pink silk eyemask for sleeping on the flight, her moisturiser to cope with the dryness of the cabin, and her flat shoes (socks in her carry-on bags), she had travelling down pat.

It was only when the airport double doors swept open and she was suddenly out of the international-no-man’s-land of the airport and into the actual country of her birth that it all hit her.

This wasn’t a routine work trip or even a planned trip home: this was an emergency visit because her beloved grandmother might be dying.

Directly outside the doors, standing right in front of lots of moving human traffic crossing the road, Izzie Silver stopped pushing her trolley and started sobbing for herself.
A hundred miles away, Anneliese sat at her aunt-in-law’s bedside and talked softly about how she felt, and how she simply wasn’t able to cry.

‘It’s like I’ve this black hole inside me,’ she whispered, even though there was no need to talk so quietly. There was plenty of noise in the bustling ward where Lily had been moved earlier that morning. They needed the bed in the intensive care unit and with no change in the old lady’s condition, and no sign of any change, the small hospital couldn’t justify keeping her in a vital ICU bed.

‘Crying would be better,’ Anneliese went on. ‘Therapeutic or something. But I can’t. It’s like being full of nothingness. No matter what I do or how I try to buoy myself up, it’s hopeless. Grey, dismal desert only with blackness everywhere. Oh, Lily,’ she sighed to the still, silent figure in the bed. ‘I wish you were here so I could tell you – well, you
are
here, but not in the same way.’

Lily’s pale, lined face didn’t flicker.

Anneliese didn’t know if she was present or not. Were people in comas
there
? Even so, talking to an almost-not-there Lily still surpassed talking to everyone else.

‘The oddest things occur to me about it all. Like the fact that Nell was so bitter,’ Anneliese whispered. ‘She said I must have known about her and Edward. That was almost the worst thing. She kept insisting that I knew and allowed it to go on. I
didn’t
. I swear on the Bible, Lily, I didn’t. How could I let Edward have an affair and not say a word to him about it? I wouldn’t, and not with Nell.

‘She was my friend. Was,’ Anneliese added bitterly. ‘Nobody’s going to believe me if she’s my best friend and she says I knew all along. I won’t be believed and, if I deny it, she’ll say I’m just a vengeful ex. She might even tell Edward that she and I had talked about it. She could tell him anything, and how would he believe me over her?’

It wasn’t a relief to say these horrible things. They hurt as much in the telling as they did in the thinking. The ache was still there, the ache of aloneness.

What was worse was
how
she’d become alone.

The evening before, she’d sat on the verandah and stared out at the sea, trying not to think about the beautiful trapped whale still circling sadly in the harbour, and she’d thought about her Worst Case Scenarios.

It was a trick of hers when she felt depression looming: to think of the very worst things that could happen and visualise herself coping with them. A person could cope with anything, she knew, making herself think of people who’d gone through every pain possible from torture to seeing people they loved murdered.

Edward’s death was one of her Worst Case Scenarios.

She remembered seeing an interview with a woman who’d been widowed in the World Trade Center attacks and it had almost hurt to watch it. The woman’s pain was so raw, so open and she spoke of how her life had changed and now, she expected the worst.

Her words had resonated with Anneliese for two reasons: because she was speaking of widowhood, and Anneliese knew too many widows of her own age not to fear it, and secondly, because Anneliese had felt that sense of fear all her life: that pain was just round the corner, waiting its time. She’d felt like that for ever. Waiting for the blade to fall.

She’d been so cautious, pushing Edward with his healthy heart and his healthy diet to have blood tests every year at the doctor’s. She’d cooked giant lumps of broccoli, bought him fish-oil tablets, stocked the fridge with blueberries. She’d done everything to keep him with her, warding off disease.

He’d been taken anyway. He might as well have died. It was like he
had
died, in a way.

‘How did you manage, Lily?’ Anneliese asked. ‘How did you manage when Alice and Robby died? Forgive me, but I keep thinking that death is almost easier. You can grieve. How can I grieve?’

And then she checked herself: Lily had done her grieving privately because she’d had to keep calm for Izzie.

‘Forgive me, Lily,’ she said now. ‘That was terrible of me. Nothing could be worse than losing Alice. I’m sorry. There’s no comparing my loss to yours. I’m sitting here whining and I haven’t had as much taken from me as you. But I can’t help feeling devastated. I only wish you were here. You could make sense of it all for me before I go totally crazy.’

‘Good morning. How are we all doing here?’ said a cheerful young voice.

Anneliese looked up, startled by the interruption. A nurse hovered and from the ultra-friendly set of her face, Anneliese guessed she’d heard the end of the monologue. Anneliese was too sad to feel embarrassed. She guessed that nurses were used to hearing people murmuring hidden thoughts at hospital bedsides.

‘I just want to check on your mother-in-law’s vitals,’ the nurse said, still smiling.

Anneliese nodded and moved out of the way, not bothering to correct her. Aunt-in-law sounded ridiculous. ‘Will you be long?’ she asked.

‘We might be a while. You should take a walk outside,’ the nurse said, resiliently cheerful. ‘It’s a lovely day.’

‘Yes,’ said Anneliese. Lovely day for throwing yourself over a cliff. What would the poor girl do if she said that? Probably find the on-call psychiatrist and tell him there was a mad woman in-house, and could they find her a bed, a straitjacket and a needleful of benzodiazepam.

She collected her bag and went into the corridor, not knowing quite what to do with herself. Somehow, she ended
up in the small hospital coffee shop, at a table with a cup of frothy white coffee and a scone that looked hard enough to bounce off the walls. She wasn’t in the slightest bit hungry, but she buttered the scone anyway and bit into it.

Keep putting the fuel in, she remembered someone saying to her once. But why? Old worn-out cars got scrapped. Why couldn’t old, worn-out people get scrapped too? Why bother putting fuel in when the engine was gone?

She shoved the scone away and, to occupy herself, switched on her mobile phone. Brendan had sent her a text message. He was hopeless with phones, spent so long sending the simplest message that the time involved far outweighed the benefits of texting versus actually phoning.

Once, she, Beth and Izzie had laughed gently with him over his hopelessness in this area. Now, Anneliese wondered if she’d ever laugh at anything again. What did laughing actually feel like? Would she ever do it again?

Marvellous news. Izzie has arrived. She will be at the hospital by four
.

No text shorthand for Brendan.

Anneliese thought of Izzie, who was strong on the outside and soft as a marshmallow on the inside, and how she’d cry at the sight of her darling Gran in the hospital bed. Then, she thought of Beth, who’d sobbed when she’d heard the news on the phone, but who couldn’t come until the weekend.

‘Of course, don’t rush,’ Anneliese had reassured her. Reassuring her daughter was what Anneliese did best. ‘Gran will be OK.’

Another lie. Who knew if Lily would really be all right or not? But there was method to her madness: the longer Beth stayed away, the more time Anneliese would have before she had to tell her daughter the horrible news about her parents’ separation.

It was ridiculous that she still hadn’t told Beth about her and Edward, ridiculous. Beth would be furious with her, but Anneliese just hadn’t had the heart to do it. As if telling her daughter would make it all true.

Anneliese knew she could not be strong enough for both Izzie and Beth.

That
was what she’d wanted to tell Lily before the nurse interrupted them.

‘Beth doesn’t need me,’ she half-whispered to herself in the hospital coffee shop. ‘She has Marcus to look after her and he adores her. Nobody needs me any more. I don’t have to be here. For the first time ever, I don’t have to be here.’

It was both liberating and terrifying at the same time.

She didn’t need to be there. Be anywhere. She could jump off the cliff or walk into the sea and keep walking, and it wouldn’t really matter.

‘How did you manage, Lily?’ she wondered out loud.

She partly knew the answer: Lily had thrown herself into raising Izzie. She’d had to bury her own grief and deal with her granddaughter’s instead. But Anneliese had nobody to take care of. She had only herself and, right now, she didn’t care what happened to Anneliese Kennedy.

The first person Izzie saw when she went into the four-bed ward was Anneliese. Sitting by a bed with knitting on her lap and a far-away look on her face, she seemed so wonderfully familiar that Izzie had to bite her lip to stop herself crying again and ruining all the repair work she’d done with make-up on the way there.

Then she saw her grandmother, tiny and frail as a child in the bed, with no hint of the vital woman she’d known all her life. Shock leached the colour from Izzie’s face and her emotional armour came tumbling down.

‘Anneliese,’ Izzie gasped, grabbing her aunt’s hands in horror and stopping beside the bed. ‘Oh God, poor Gran, my poor Gran.’

Anneliese could do nothing but pat Izzie’s shoulders as the younger woman held on to the little body in the bed, sobbing ‘Gran.’

It was almost too private to watch, Anneliese thought, and she began to turn away, hoping nobody else would approach so that Izzie could mourn in peace.

‘Anneliese! She’s talking!’

‘What?’ Anneliese rushed to the other side of the bed. ‘She hasn’t woken up, Izzie, not since…We should call the doctor.’

‘Yes, Gran.’ Izzie wasn’t listening to Anneliese. She was bent close to her grandmother’s face, trying to decipher the faint words.

Lily’s mouth was moving and her eyes were open, shining out of her face with a vitality undimmed by nearly ninety years of life.

‘We’re here, Lily,’ Anneliese said gently. ‘You’re in hospital. You had a stroke, love, but you’re going to be all right.’

Lily stared up at the ceiling, as if she was looking at somebody neither of them could see.

‘Jamie,’ she whispered in a voice as faint as paper rustling on the wind. ‘Jamie, are you there?’

Izzie and Anneliese stared at each other across the bed.
Jamie
? Neither of them knew of a Jamie.

‘Jamie?’

‘Gran, it’s me, Izzie.’ Izzie stroked her grandmother’s cheek softly, but Lily’s eyes closed slowly shut and the brief moment of vitality faded from her face.

‘I don’t understand,’ Izzie said. ‘Dad said she was still unconscious…’

‘She was. She still is,’ Anneliese said. ‘That wasn’t really waking up, was it? Your voice reached her, for sure, but she wasn’t talking to us. She was seeing someone else –’

‘Jamie.’ Izzie sat heavily down on the chair beside the bed. ‘Who the hell is Jamie?’