Then and Always (7 page)

He nodded, but he didn’t look happy.

“Will you be all right?” His eyes searched my face in concern. “You don’t look very well.”

“I’ll be okay. I just need to sleep off this headache. I’ll be fine.”

I could sense his reluctance to leave me, so I summoned up a manufactured smile from some unknown well of strength. “Go.”

He smiled back. “I’m not going to give up on you, you know,” he promised, getting back in his car. “You drove me off once but I’m not going to give in so easily this time.”

“Go,” I repeated, the entreaty threaded through with a note of desperation. And at last he did, the car sweeping across the forecourt and disappearing into the darkness with a flash of brake lights as it entered the flow of traffic.

As I wearily mounted the three stone steps to the hotel’s foyer, I couldn’t help but think his parting comment had sounded more like a threat than a promise.

WHEN I FINALLY
swiped the key card into its slot and entered my hotel room, I was surprised to see that it was only a little after ten o’clock. It felt much later. I kicked off my shoes and sank gratefully onto the bed. Drawing a pyramid of pillows up behind me, I switched off all but the bedside lamp and lay back with my eyes closed. The headache was still at fever pitch, and I was afraid it had settled in for the night. I also knew it was far too soon to take more painkillers; at this rate the bottle would be emptied long before the wedding. I had to start rationing.

I tried for fifteen minutes to clear my mind, but it refused to empty. The day kept spooling through my tortured head in slow motion. I saw again and again the look in Janet’s eyes as she spoke of her dead son and told me how much I had always meant to him. I heard again my own denial, the same
denial I had uselessly echoed to Matt when he had made the same claim. I couldn’t believe they were both right. That
everyone
had been right.

Was it really possible to have been so blind, to have missed such a vital truth in our relationship? These were impossible questions to answer. And the tragedy of knowing I would never, could never, be sure was crumbling my resolve not to allow my thoughts to reach out for Jimmy. I needed him now, at this moment, more than ever; to hear his voice, to look into the smile that always lived in his eyes for me.

Without pausing to make a conscious decision, I swung my legs off the bed and groped around for my shoes. The lateness of the hour didn’t worry me. I knew there was only one place I could go now to ask these questions, to say what I had to say.

THE NIGHT HAD
turned even colder when I walked past the bemused doorman who had bidden me good night only twenty minutes before. The cold wind numbed my face as I turned and began walking swiftly down the street. If challenged, I could always claim that I’d taken the walk to find relief from my headache, but in reality I needed an altogether different kind of solace. And the location held no horrors for me. How could it? There was nothing to fear from a ghost when they were someone you loved.

The dark streets were almost deserted; it was too cold and too late for an evening stroll. My shoes crunched on pavements already beginning to glaze with a light frosting of ice. When the wind bit into my face with icy fangs, I burrowed my chin deeper into my scarf and walked into its jaws with steely determination.

I faltered for a second when I rounded the last street corner and the church came into view. It stood alone at the top of a hill, with no shops or houses nearby. Its closest neighbor was the town’s railway station, and that stood almost two miles away. Even on a clear day, the red-brick station building was completely obscured by the churchyard’s high iron railings. Its isolation was perhaps meant to engender a feeling of peace and tranquility, but on this dark December night neither of those emotions was foremost in my mind.

As I approached the large arched gate, I wondered what I would do if it was locked. Climb over? I looked up and surveyed the height of the fence … no, that wasn’t going to happen. Come back in the morning, I supposed. Yet the urgency to make this very real and physical connection with Jimmy was so strong I didn’t think I could wait until first light.

The gate swung open on well-oiled hinges. Strange, I’d felt sure it was going to creak and make the cliché complete.

Once inside the churchyard I felt my courage waver slightly. Was it an act of total madness, to be wandering around a graveyard at this time of night? Wasn’t this just the sort of behavior I’d always ridiculed heroines for in the movies?

A noise from an approaching car startled me, and instinctively I ducked behind a large oak tree to avoid being picked up in its headlights. I wasn’t sure if I was actually committing a criminal offense—like trespass—but winding up at a police station, trying to justify my actions, was not how I planned to end the evening. As soon as the car was out of sight, I drew away from the tree and walked with renewed purpose toward the rear of the church, where the small graveyard was situated.

There weren’t many graves in this part of the cemetery. The larger, older section was around the other side, and I
supposed the large crematorium in the next town might account for the comparatively few new markers I could see in this more traditional place of rest. But I knew that Janet would have wanted somewhere close by to visit her son. The easiest way to find him would be to look for the best-maintained plot.

I didn’t have to look at many before I found what I was searching for. Just long enough to read half a dozen moving and heart-wrenching epitaphs as I walked among the granite headstones.
DEAREST HUSBAND, BELOVED GRANDMOTHER, MUCH LOVED FATHER
. So much grief, so many tears, the frozen soil was saturated with sadness.

Jimmy’s grave was slightly to one side, clearly newer than its neighbors. The headstone was sparkling white marble that seemed to glow under the winter moon’s iridescence. I walked around and steadied myself for a moment before reading his inscription.

JIMMY BOYD
LOST TOO SOON AT 18 YEARS.
CHERISHED SON AND LOYAL FRIEND.
OUR LOVE FOR YOU WILL LIVE ON FOREVER.

A sob broke from me, so raw with grief it sounded more animal than human. I felt my knees buckle and I sank onto the cold grass beside his grave. I had come here hoping to voice all of my feelings, but none could reach the surface through the molten lava of pain. I had believed that over the years I had finally accepted Jimmy’s death, but I realized now that all I had done was put a thin plaster over a gaping wound. I was incapable of words, only able to rock slowly back and forth on my knees, repeating his name over and over again.

It was too painful. I wasn’t strong enough, either physically or emotionally, to cope with this grief tonight. It was madness to have come. Still hiccupping soft sorrowful sobs, I started to get to my feet and then swayed forward, only stopping myself from falling by flinging out my hand onto the ice-slick turf. My head felt suddenly strange, too heavy for my neck to hold. Then, giving a small helpless cry, my supporting arm gave way and I fell forward onto the cold, unyielding ground beside the grave.

The pain from my head now encompassed my entire neck and shoulders, and I wondered if I had somehow struck myself on a rock when I fell. But the cold grass beneath my cheek was clear of any obstruction. Very slowly, trying to minimize each movement of my head, I inched back my arms until both hands were flat on the soil on either side of me. I tried to lever myself up but my quivering forearms would not comply. After several abortive attempts, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to get to my feet that way.

Suddenly the danger I was in was terrifyingly obvious. I was lying, sick and virtually immobile, in a deserted graveyard. No one knew I was here; no one was going to miss me—not until the morning at least. I could
die
here. The thought, so terrifying, managed to pierce through the viselike pain in my head. I had no idea how long it took to die of exposure, or hypothermia. But I did know that I wasn’t going to give up and lie down to die beside the boy who’d lost his life while saving mine.

Trying to ignore the agony in my head, I tried to roll gently onto my side. My progress was slow, each movement sending a paralyzing spasm from my neck. I stopped several times to gather my breath, finding the strength to continue not in my desire to live, but in the knowledge of what losing me would do to my father.

Eventually, when I had regained my breath a little, I gingerly raised my knees toward my chest. At least that area of my body wasn’t in pain, but it did feel oddly numb, which I supposed must have been a result of lying on the frozen ground. With my legs in position, I realized I couldn’t afford to tackle my next maneuver so delicately. I didn’t have much strength left and it felt very much like this would have to be an all-or-nothing attempt. I braced my arm to support myself, took a deep breath, held it, and rolled with Herculean effort onto my knees.

Bright spots of light pinwheeled behind my eyes; I felt the sway of an incipient faint, and bit deeply into my lower lip to fight back against the weakness. When it had passed, I cautiously opened my eyes. I was still on all fours, and was so grateful not to have succumbed to unconsciousness that it took me a moment or two to realize there was something wrong with my eyes. Seriously wrong. An involuntary cry of terror escaped my frozen lips. I had no sight in my right eye, and in my left only tunnel vision, the periphery of my eyesight disappearing into a cloudy fog. I knew this wasn’t anything to do with exposure, hypothermia, or intense grief. The loss of sight was the last dire link in the chain of symptoms my specialist had cautioned about, which I had unwisely chosen to ignore.

I couldn’t afford to let myself panic. I groped with my left hand, found the wide marble edge of Jimmy’s headstone, and pulled myself upright on legs that felt as stable as elastic. I had stupidly left my mobile in the hotel room, so my only chance of aid was to try to get to the road. Hoping they would forgive me for the disrespect, I used the surrounding grave markers as handholds as I made my slow and unsteady way through the graveyard.

The sight in my left eye was decreasing at an alarming rate; the small circle of vision now felt as though I were looking through a narrow tube. I tried to ignore my greatest dread that this might be permanent. I couldn’t allow that thought to overwhelm my mind, or exhaustion to take my body. It was hard, particularly when what I wanted to do more than anything was lie down and close my eyes against this pain-racked nightmare. Even walking was now proving difficult, and each shaky step I took had all the fluidity of a newly awakened zombie.

As I left the last gravestone support, I thought I could vaguely make out a distant sound. Was that a train from the station or could there be a car approaching? It was probably not yet eleven o’clock, surely not that late for someone to be driving by? The road, although quiet, might still have the occasional passing car. But from where I stood, in the shadows of the church and the trees, I knew I would never be seen. The noise grew louder. It
was
a car.

“Help!” I cried out uselessly. “Please stop, help!”

I lurched forward, trying to run and raise my arms to flag down the car. It was my last bad idea, in an evening full of them. Running isn’t really an option when you can barely stand. Or see. I was already pitching headfirst toward oblivion when the car’s headlights arced into the starlit sky.

Also Five Years Later …

The man must have been watching me for a considerable period of time before I first became aware of him. Of course, he could have been right beside me on the crowded underground platform and I’d never have known it, packed as we were like cattle during the usual Friday evening exodus from London. Moving along the twisting tiled passages while changing underground lines, I wasn’t really aware of anything except the annoyance of having to drag my small suitcase behind me through rush hour. I stopped apologizing after I’d run over about the fifth pair of feet. It had been a huge mistake to leave so late; it would have made far more sense to have driven down with Matt that morning as he had suggested, but I had an immovable deadline for an article I’d been working on that couldn’t be ignored.

“Shall I wait for you, and we’ll drive down together when you’re done?”

I’d considered that for a moment but then dismissed the idea.

“No, there’s no sense in both of us being late. You go on ahead, I’ll finish at work and then catch the fast train down.”

IT HAD SEEMED
like such a good idea at the time, and now … well, not so good at all. Between my attempts at weaving through the crowds with the suitcase in tow, I kept glancing frantically at my watch, knowing time was fast running out if I was going to make the mainline train out of London for Great Bishopsford. At this rate I would be lucky to get to the restaurant before dessert was served. Guilt at letting Sarah down added impetus to my stride and I caromed between two suited businessmen, earning a very ungentlemanly comment from one of them.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, not even glancing back to see if my apology had been heard.

I looked again at my watch: I had less than twelve minutes until the train left. I was going to have to make a run for it. As I lowered my arm a sudden flash of brilliance arced back at me, momentarily dazzling in the reflection of an overhead light. Damn! That showed how harassed I was, because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d forgotten to hide my ring before taking the tube. In one swift movement I swiveled the large diamond on my ring finger so that it now nestled against my palm, showing only a plain platinum band. Matt would have been furious if he’d known I’d forgotten. He really didn’t like me wearing it for traveling, but what was the point of having such a fabulous engagement ring if it had to be kept locked up in a safe all the time?

God knows how but I made the train with barely seconds
to spare. My heart was still thumping furiously in my chest from my sprint down the platform as I stowed my case in the overhead rack; my legs were trembling from the unaccustomed exertion. As I sat down I promised myself that this year my New Year’s resolution would be to actually
go
to the gym I spent so much money on and hadn’t visited for three months or more. In this area of my life as in so many others, all my good intentions had swiftly been buried in an avalanche of work.