Letting You Go (2 page)

‘C
rappy
neon
, Alex. Neon! It’s a florist’s not a bloody tattoo parlour! You should see it all lit up at night. One big, craptastic eyesore.’

‘Jem, please stop saying
craptastic
, darling. You sound like a teenage boy.’ Alex heard their mother sigh in the background and allowed herself a little one of her own so the other two Foster women couldn’t hear it. The call was on loudspeaker. It was Blythe’s way of pulling Alex as best she could back into the heart of the family home while she prepared the meal Alex never came back to eat.

Jem exhaled irritably again. ‘Carrie always did have a flair for cheapening her environment.’

‘Jaime Foster, you catty girl.’ Alex heard their mother tease.

‘Better a cat than a total bitch, Mum.’

‘Oh, Jem.’ Their mum didn’t like bad language of any sort. Never had, although Blythe would turn a deaf ear if Ted or the girls used an obscenity so long as there was a legitimate reason. Like stubbing a toe, or winning the lottery. Not that anyone had ever won the lottery.

‘Alex knows what I mean, mum,’ Jem called back to Blythe. ‘You know what I mean, right Al?’

Alex was decompressing, gradually leaving the carnage of Dill’s birthday the way those crazy scuba divers she sometimes watched on Discovery would gradually leave a doomed shipwreck in the murky depths, steadily and cautiously in case they got ‘the bends’. Returning to the surface of Foster family life felt a lot like that sometimes. Something to take steady before the change in pressure did something catastrophic to Alex’s system. Thankfully, although Jem’s evergreen hang-ups with Carrie Logan – arch-frenemy since their days at Eilidh High – had never made much sense to Alex, they were good enough to change the subject from Blythe and Jem’s visit down to the churchyard earlier. (It had been one of those trivial fallings out between teenage girls, Jem had claimed, the kind that burn on ferociously like the light from a dead star, years after the main event.)

Alex could feel the tension leaving her shoulders as Jem vented about Carrie. It felt good. Normal. This must be what it felt like for those mental free-divers, Alex always thought, when they found oxygen again after plumbing the depths on just one devoted lungful of air.

Alex had taken a reassuring breath of her own just before dialling her parents’ number. It hadn’t been half as uncomfortable as she always prepared herself for. It never was. She shouldn’t be so hypersensitive; she had no right. They all deserved so much more from her and what did she do? Drag her heels all day as if phoning her family was the
worst thing in the world.
You will remember this next year, Alex. You will remember that
you
make it worse, not them.
But guilt was a lot like love, doing funny things to the mind.

Jem had railroaded the conversation beautifully as ever. Jem was an excellent railroader, a seasoned expert at smoothing the awkward away with a nice thick layer of normality, as if they were all just enjoying a regular everyday catch-up with each other. Blythe too, as unwaveringly warm as she was thoughtful, had gushed about the flowers Alex had sent home, lest Alex’s woefully inadequate annual gesture ever go un-championed. ‘Oh, Alex … sunflowers and thistles!’ Blithe had delighted, ‘Such a simple posy but, just so beautiful, darling. Really, the perfect choice. Ted? Come tell Alex how beautiful those sunflowers are,’ her mum had encouraged. ‘Your dad commented on them, darling, and you know how oblivious Foster men are. Did you know, your father wanted sunflowers at our wedding? Your grandma Rosalind said they weren’t a traditional choice though, so that was that.’

Alex did know that. She also knew how fond her dad was of the colour the thistles gave to the hillside behind the farmhouse, but she wouldn’t allow herself to question who it was exactly she always sent the flowers for. Ted hadn’t gotten round to mentioning the sunflowers when he’d finally come on the line anyway. He’d had to dash off on a callout, thinning out their already skinny chat about the price Alex was paying for diesel down south.

Alex felt another pang of guilt. As soon as she’d heard the front door closing after her dad at the other end of the line, that tightness in her chest had begun to release. She was resurfacing.

‘Boring you, am I?’ Jem asked.

‘You’re boring me a little bit, darling,’ Blythe echoed. Alex could tell her mother had her head in the Aga. Blythe was exceptional at keeping her kids and cooking in check at the same time.

‘No … Sorry, Jem.’ Alex smiled.

‘You know what I mean, though, don’t you?’

Alex rallied herself. ‘About what?’

‘The
neon
!’ Jem asserted.

‘Sure. Neon … for a florist’s.’ Alex agreed. ‘I mean, if Carrie’s making
crazy
decisions like that, what else is she getting up to in there, huh?’ She was teasing, but Jem missed it, her high-school nemesis was still ram-raiding her thoughts. Alex thought she heard her mother laugh but it was difficult to be sure over the clanking of the table being set.

‘
Exactly
,’ Jem huffed, ‘that cow is not to be trusted.’

‘Jem!’ Blythe implored. ‘Change the record.’

Dill’s birthday had become sacred, more sacred than Christmas even and Christmas wasn’t a day for
crap
or
bitch
or
cow
either.

‘You can’t tell me off, Mum. I’m twenty-four.’ Jem let out a sudden yelp. ‘And you can’t whack me with a wooden spoon, Mum!’

‘Want to bet, young lady?’

Alex smiled into the phone. It was impossible not to feel steadied by her mother. Throughout everything, Blythe had held the balance.

‘I’m sure there are more riveting topics you and Alex can talk about besides Carrie Logan, Jem, surely? Can’t you gossip about men, or diets or something … like normal sisters?’

It had occurred to Alex years ago that she and Jem were not
normal sisters
, not if swapping juicy titbits about boyfriends and diets was the standard. Alex still wasn’t wholly sure whether she should feel more or less sad about that. It wasn’t love or affection she and Jem were missing, but years. Those intense teenage years where experiences and emotions were heightened and giddy and sisters confided and shared. Alex had left for uni and overnight it was as if something seismic had shifted leaving Alex on one side of a gaping chasm and Jem on the other. Not just their age gap. Alex could feel something else there stuck between them, something more than five big teenage years. Whatever it was, Alex had never poked at it, in case it turned out she was responsible for that too.

The phone had fallen silent. Something furtive seemed to be going on at the other end. ‘OK, OK,’ Jem whispered. She feigned an over-excited tone. ‘So guess who we saw? At the church?’

Alex ran through the usual suspects. Blythe had already told her how Susannah and Helen had each left flowers for
Dill this morning, but other than Blythe’s old choir-buddies and the Reverend no-one else sprang to mind. ‘I give up. Who did you see?’

Jem laughed then. An odd, pre-cursory chortle. ‘Guess.’ But Alex didn’t have time to guess, Jem couldn’t hold it in. ‘Only
Finn.’

Alex felt her thoughts slow down, sinking to the bottom of her brain like globules of wax in a lava lamp – heavy, vivid, helpless colour.

Finn.
She’d been pressing that name to the back of her mind all day and Jem had just let it loose. Thoughts of Dill nearly always came piggy-backed by thoughts of Finn. Bound together by time and circumstance.

Jem was riding out the pause. All of a sudden, she could wait all day. Alex made a grab for something coherent. ‘Finn? But …’ she managed.

‘I know, right?’

‘Finn’s back in the Falls? But … I thought …’

‘I
know.
The rover’s returned and, by the looks of things, he’s all done with the intrepid explorer bit.’

Alex could feel a warm uncomfortable sensation brewing over the back of her neck. Jem would test her this way, now and again. She’d poke Alex like a bruise just to gauge if she was still tender, and all Alex could do was do her best not to flinch. It was like being ambushed. Stupid really, that she would be ambushed by this of all news. Eilidh Falls was his home, after all, of course he wasn’t going to stay away
forever.

Alex held the phone, waiting to hear the next nuggets of Jem’s reconnaissance back home to filter down the line. Surprise began to twist into resignation. Finn had gone back to settle down, with a wife probably. And a family.
Children.
Beautiful children, sharing his glorious scruffy hair and playful eyes. He could’ve met a thousand women as he’d backpacked and odd-jobbed his way around the planet, exotic and captivating like the places he’d daubed on his bedroom wall. His ‘Great Adventure List!’
Their
list.

Alex waited for news of the impossibly beautiful wife and their impossibly beautiful offspring to sock her one through the earpiece. Blythe had gone quiet in the background. She’d have been pleased for sure to bump into him, Alex knew it. Her mum’s fondness for Finn had never waned. Blythe had never blamed Finn.

‘Mum turned into a bashful teenager when she saw him, didn’t you, Ma? She thinks he’s even more handsome with a bit of colour on him.’

‘I was not bashful, Jem. I just think it’s a shame that boy hasn’t been snapped up. He should be bouncing a small child around on those lovely broad shoulders of his by now. “Too busy for love”? How can anyone ever be
too busy for love
?’

No wife. No impossibly beautiful children. Something briefly floated inside Alex before she could stop it, like a hot air balloon momentarily lifting a few inches from the earth before bobbing back down again with a thud. Finn was single then. Fab. Just as it was fab whenever George Clooney
came back onto the market. Fab and uplifting and irrelevant all at once.

‘I wonder,’ Blythe lilted, ‘perhaps he’s
gay
now. He has been broadening his horizons for the last two years. I’ll bet he’s tried all sorts of new things. Food and … well,
whatnot.
’

Alex startled. Gay?
Gay?
Finn was not gay! No way. You couldn’t be
that
close to a person and not know something like that, Alex decided with ultimate certainty.

At the other end of the phone Jem was being uncharacteristically quiet, waiting for Alex to bite. Alex shrugged as if her sister could see it. ‘Susannah must be happy. To have him back safe and sound,’ she bumbled.

Finn had spent the last two years somewhere the ogher side of the planet. Had he been walking it all out of his system the way he used to, only instead of rambling around the countryside he’d gone rambling around the globe? Two years as far away as he could …

‘I guess. He was painting the railings on St Cuthbert’s wall, you know. Finn’s the new maintenance guy about town. He’s got the contract for the church. He’s re-opened Torben’s hardware shop too. On the high street.’ Jem’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘And in case you were wondering, throwing tools around hasn’t done him any harm either, Al. He’s like …
buff
now. No more noodle arms,’ Jem chirped.

Alex’s lava lamp brain was heating up. Torben’s? Right across the street from the garage? Alex imagined her father’s mood each time he looked out across the high street.
They would be virtually face to face, every single day. Alex swallowed. Her dad would have an ulcer by New Year.

‘He asked after you, Al.’

Blythe had moved back into motion in the background but the clinking of tableware had become more delicate while the conversation played out between her daughters.

Alex’s thoughts were swirling faster and faster now. ‘Erm … That’s nice.’
That’s nice?
And the rest. Alex expected Jem to laugh again but Jem was waiting it out instead. Well what did Jem expect her to say?
Did he, Jem? DID HE? What did he ask after me, exactly? Did he ask if I’m sorry I cut him loose like a ground rope? Whether I’m sorry for what I said? Did he ask if it still hurts when I think about him?

There was a light thrumming in Alex’s ears and she forgot briefly about what Jem was or was not saying at the other end of the line for a moment, suddenly taken aback by just how many of those statements she could answer with a resounding
yes.

‘He asked if you might be around for the Viking Festival. He couldn’t believe the hype now either but he said it would be good to see it all in full swing. He also said it would be good to see you.’

Something cold danced down Alex’s spine. It was always mind-boggling that Finn had ever wanted to set eyes on any of them ever again. Alex closed her eyes and pictured her dad in his Christmas pudding jumper standing over Finn in their front yard, wild and enraged as Finn’s blood had mingled
with the whipped cream on his best shirt. The resistance in Finn’s expression, the horror in Susannah’s as she and Blythe had shielded Finn where he sat awkwardly amongst the shattered crystal on the path.

Alex’s heart was gently pattering, just at the recollection. They shouldn’t be having this conversation. Her dad could walk back into the house at any moment and hear them all, chatting away, saying
that name
in his kitchen.

‘Yes, darling, why don’t you come on up here for the Viking Festival? It’s only the weekend, you wouldn’t need to miss any work.’ Alex took a few extra breaths. They were both in on it, Mum and Jem. Finn was home, get Alex back there too and hey, presto! Lightning might strike. Didn’t they ever learn? ‘It really would be lovely to see you, Alexandra.’ There was a tinge of pleading in her mother’s voice. It hurt just to hear it.

‘I don’t think I can make it, Mum. We’re so short-staffed, weekends are for catch-up,’ she lied, ‘next year, for definite.’ To her mind it was a simple equation. Stay away from the Falls and nothing ugly like that would ever happen again.

Alex heard the front door of her parents’ home rattle open in the background. ‘Forgot my damned phone,’ Ted groaned, his heavy boots trouncing across the hallway into the kitchen. All three Foster women fell silent.