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‘If you were smarter, dog, you’d have tried my daughter’s room,’ Ted sighed. The girls had always gone gaga for puppies, just like Blythe. Ted wasn’t one to shout it from the rooftops but he’d always quietly beamed when somebody remarked how alike his girls were to their mother. Daughters should be like their mothers and Blythe and their girls were the most beautiful creatures in the Falls. He’d challenge anyone to say they weren’t. Of course, the same folks had said on occasion how Dill got his looks from Ted, but it was easy to tell the difference between true observation and politeness. Besides his dirty blond hair Dill had looked very little like him, Ted knew that. No matter what the heart wanted to be true, there was no disputing what his eyes told him every time he’d walked passed the photographs of Dillon hanging in the hall downstairs.
Blythe had taken herself off into the frozen garden and cried for an hour straight when he’d taken down the Son from the garage sign. He shouldn’t have climbed up there, yanking it away with his own hands, he realised that now. But he couldn’t bear seeing it any longer. It would be a lie to have left it up there, calling out an untruth to everyone passing by. The Fosters’ name would come to an end when the girls married, they all knew that. There were some people who’d known it before Ted had.
That same old hollowness began to yawn like a chasm inside him. The puppy squeaked for attention again but Ted was resolute. ‘You’ll have to wait, little one. I have something to do before breakfast.’ The bastard was good and dead now. No more a part of the town, no longer a thorn in their sides. And when Ted made it to the churchyard, by God, he hoped he’d find that the old son of a bitch had finally taken the last of his poorly kept goddamn secrets with him.
2
November 2006 (#ulink_10c10036-ea1e-5b8e-a34f-1640d85a501e)
Alex felt him tense, harden like her clay; Finn’s whole body beside her suddenly off limits, no longer hers to touch.
‘That’s not it. It’s not that I don’t want anyone to know, Finn. I just can’t upset him again, he’s my dad. I’ve already put him through so much.’ Finn took his hand back, slow enough that it wasn’t like a punishment. Only it was. Alex stopped herself from grabbing it and bringing those fingers back to her again. ‘Now’s just … it’s not good timing, Jem’s getting into trouble at school and—’
‘So how long, Alex? I’m ready to get my lights punched out to stand up for the way I feel about you, how long until you’re ready to stand up for how you say you feel for me?’
Alex’s palm was still lying against Finn’s chest. Should she move it? Everything about him was starting to feel defensive. The way he was pushing his hair away from his face, the tension through his arms.
‘I do feel that way, Finn. I love you.’
‘Do you?’
She was losing him. She could already feel it. ‘You know I do. You’ve always known.’
‘So tell him. Tell him, Alex. Tell him we’re young and in love and we’d do anything to change what happened. But we can’t. All we can do is keep moving forwards and sometimes that means moving against the current.’
Something had shifted in the air between them. It was a similar feeling to watching one of her clay pots lose its shape when it had stood to be so beautiful before she’d cocked it up. Maybe if she was careful, deft enough, she could bring it back again, coax it all back into shape. ‘He’s my dad, Finn. I can’t keep pushing him. I love you, and I love him too. I need him to have the chance to understand.’
‘Understand what?’
‘How sorry I am! It happened on our watch, Finn! I can’t be sorry for that and ram you down his throat at the same time. You know what he thinks we were doing!’
It was all coming flooding back. She didn’t want to go there right now. It would spoil everything, the candlelight, the snow outside. The taste of him still on her mouth. She was going to wear that taste away with these awful words.
Alex spoke quietly. ‘I just think we should keep things private, just for a while.’
‘Hide our relationship, you mean?’ Finn was not speaking quietly.
‘Not hide, just … take our time.’
Finn propped himself angrily against the headboard. ‘You want me to love you in secret, Alex? Hide how I feel, like I had to when my dad skipped out on my mum and me?’ Alex took her hand back. He couldn’t feel her now anyway. ‘That was no fun, Alex. Pretending I hated my own father because if I didn’t I’d be reminded of all the reasons why I should. I knew he hadn’t checked those brakes properly for your dad, I knew he’d rushed Mrs Fairbanks’ service to get to a shitty poker game, but I didn’t know how to tell anyone that I still loved him anyway because he was still my dad, or even how what he’d done to Millie Fairbanks and her mum wasn’t enough to stop me still wanting him home with us again.’
‘Finn …’ Alex felt herself shrink away in her too-small bed. Suddenly she felt totally, shamefully naked.
‘I know what my old man did, Alex. I know what he did to Millie, and your dad’s business and to my mum and me. But I still loved him. Only I had to do it in secret. I had to hide it.’ Finn shook his head. ‘I’m not signing up for that again, Alex. You don’t do that with love. You stand up for it and you take the blows and you bleed for it if you have to.’
‘I’m responsible, Finn. Don’t you get that? I lost Dill, I lost him! He was just a little boy, and I didn’t protect him. I stopped watching and I lost my baby brother. Their only son! I can’t just go home and—’
Finn’s eyes were greener with anger. His arms flailed wildly. ‘He died Alex! He didn’t get lost, Dill died! I had him in my arms, I could feel the knot in his lace, how I could free him!’ Finn’s body rippled with angry heartache. ‘But it was too tight. My fingers were too big and I couldn’t pull him from the root in time and he died. And you’re right. It was on our watch. But what can we possibly do that will ever make that better?’
Alex felt the hurt inside begin to twist into something resentful. ‘Not ram our happy-ever-after down his throat, Finn!’
Finn was suddenly up on his feet next to Alex’s books and their abandoned clothes, a naked ringmaster in the circus of Alex’s life. His arms were aloft again. ‘Fine! Well, what about all this? What are you going to do when you get a first with your degree, Alex? Because you will. You’ll graduate with flying colours and get the job you’ve always dreamed of in a career you’ll love. Then what?’
‘Finn.’
‘Let’s see, what about when you want to get married? Or buy your first house, or have your first kid. Are those things off limits for Ted Foster’s throat too? Or is it just me you can’t ram down it?’
‘You’re being ridiculous.’
‘No, you’re being ridiculous, Alex!’
‘No I’m not!’ She heard the tears in her voice. They were coming, they were en route. ‘Dill won’t get to do any of those things because of me.’
Finn pinned his hands on his hips and shook his head.
‘Don’t shake your head! Dill won’t ever bring a girlfriend home for my mum to cluck over, or help my dad out at the garage so he’s not breaking his back working on his own all the time. He’ll never grow up and have a laugh with Jem instead of only ever pissing her off! Dill won’t graduate, he won’t even flunk!’ Alex’s voice wobbled. It almost stopped her but the thought was too heavy to be left inside her head. ‘My brother will never go home to the Falls and tell my mum and dad that he’s met “the one”! The one person he can’t imagine living his life without because he knows there’ll never be anyone else who’ll ever come close! So how can I?’
Alex felt the first tears escape the corner of her eyes. She saw Finn relent, the tension slipping with an almost indecipherable dip of his shoulders. Gentle, calm Finn was trying to come back. ‘You’re right, Alex. Dill won’t get to do any of those things now. And I’d do anything to change it. To go back and stay right there on the riverbank, instead of messing around in the undergrowth where we couldn’t see. But we can’t change that now.’
Finn moved silently back to the bed but Alex looked away. He stopped short of reaching her.
‘I need my dad to know that I haven’t forgotten what I did, Finn. That I’ll never forget. Sorry just isn’t a big enough word,’ she said quietly.
Finn shook his head gently. ‘You’re right, Foster, it’s not. But you have a life to live. How are you going to do that if every achievement, every bit of happiness or fun you have, feels like an insult to Dill? Live half a life because he lost his? You can’t hide from your own life, Alex.’
CHAPTER 8 (#ulink_c543860a-2161-5e1d-8b27-99ac97bbebef)
Ted moved quietly between the headstones, taking in the riot of discarded colour across this quiet little corner of St Cuthbert’s. Blythe would never have left Dillon’s grave in such disarray, not unless she really was as ill as he feared. No-one had tidied the mess of abandoned flowers because no-one else had been party to Blythe’s episode, as the docs kept calling it. No-one except for that damned Sinclair boy.
Ted bristled. The Sinclairs had a knack for lurking somewhere within the fallout zone of another family’s heartache. Ted made his way over to the granite stone next to the yellow blooms left scattered across the ground and checked that he was as alone as he liked to be here. If Blythe had been home this morning, he’d have given her a kiss and told her how he needed to get an early start at the garage before slipping away to this yearly ritual of his. To visit his boy the morning after his birthday, when the rest of them had already been and gone, just to be sure he wouldn’t be crossing paths with the wrong well-wisher. Year in year out, he’d given way to a person who had no goddamned right in this world to mourn his boy.
Ted regarded the abundance of flowers Blythe and Jem had arranged with care in the water pots. He tried not to examine Blythe’s reasons for coming back down here alone yesterday evening, tried not to feel so inadequate because of them. Ted looked over his shoulder again at his peaceful surroundings. The churchyard was no place for a mother, it was sure as hell no place for child. He wanted to break the silence, speak out the way other people could. Morning, son, he always wanted to say, sorry I don’t come by as often as your mother … But Ted wasn’t like Blythe. Once he was here, in the middle of all this quiet, he could never get the words out.
Ted crouched beside Dill’s headstone ignoring the immediate ache in his knee joints. It had been Jem’s idea, to have an image of an arrow etched into the granite. He’d hated the thought, he didn’t need reminding how Dill came to be reaching so far over the water, or that it was him who had given Dillon permission to keep that goddam bow set – him who was supposed to be showing Dill how to use it. But Jem had hardly spoken a word in the run up to the funeral and Blythe had forbidden him from saying anything to risk unsettling the girls any more than they already were.
‘Do you think it will be any easier for Alexandra? To be reminded of her mistake?’ Blythe had argued.
The Finn boy barged his way into Ted’s thoughts twisting something inside him on the way. Not now, Ted. He pinched at the tension building between his eyes. There was every chance Alexandra was going to turn up here in the Falls, he knew she would. Alexandra loved her mother too much to think up one of her endless reasons to stay away. But now wasn’t the time to pick at old wounds, not when Blythe’s needs were greatest.
Over on the church path, movement stole Ted from his thoughts. He watched the elderly couple and their little dog stop and take in the temporary wooden cross where the mayor had been buried back in January. That’s it, pay your respects to the pretentious bastard. Arrows or not, at least Dillon’s memorial was modest, befitting of a Foster. Not like the monstrosity the town was awaiting to be erected in the mayor’s honour once the earth had settled around his good-for-nothing carcass.
Ted reached into the pocket of his overalls and pulled out a clean rag, running it over the letters engraved before him. Beloved son. Blythe and Jem had already cleaned and tidied Dillon’s plot yesterday morning of course, read and replaced the cards of the bouquets Helen Fairbanks and Susannah Finn still remembered to leave each year. Ted never read the cards, all that was between the women. They’d been good to Blythe over the years, long after she’d stopped singing with them and the rest of the choir girls, but only Helen Fairbanks had carried on coming up to the house. But that was your choice, Susannah. I never said you couldn’t come into our home, just not that boy of yours.
Ted felt that seasoned nip of guilt towards Susannah Finn. He thought of the way Susannah had stood in front of Finn while Ted had fought his rage. Ted promptly laid another thought over the top of the previous one as if laying salve over a stubborn cut that wouldn’t heal. Her boy had it coming.
Ted replaced the redundant cloth in his pocket and began gathering up the stems lying forgotten on the ground. He didn’t know much about flowers but he knew these ones had arrived after the rest or Blythe would’ve already had them neatly arranged in the water pots she and Jem had finished with yesterday morning. No, these had arrived later in the day. Fancy, expensive types ordered from one of those overpriced florists. Ted looked about himself for one of the fussy little miniature envelopes with the cards inside to reunite with them, but there was nothing. He tried to jolly through it but he’d already felt his back go cold. Of course there wasn’t a card. These were them, that one last anonymous bouquet that always turned up. Ted felt an instant rage burning up his neck. ‘Even now, you’ve got your filthy hands on my family, you son of a bitch.’ He’d been a fool to hope that this might be the year they finally stopped arriving.
Ted gathered up the last of the stems, a few at a time in big hands used to handling wrenches and jacks. Never a card. But then there were some who couldn’t find the words weren’t there? Could only ease their conscience by sending Dillon a hollow gesture before sodding back off to their own neat and tidy lives. Ted straightened up, trying to calm the resentment building in him but there was already a burning along his eyes. His voice was hoarse and metallic as the first tears tried to overcome him.
‘God damn you and your goddamned flowers,’ he growled under his breath.
Ted deftly eradicated the trail of moisture over his cheek with back of his wrist. The rage was instant. He knew he shouldn’t do it. He knew it was wrong. Knew that if there was a God in heaven who by chance might be glancing down upon him right now, right at this minute, then he was damned for sure.
Good men don’t do these things, he told himself, looking out across the churchyard to the plot of disturbed earth awaiting its monumental tribute to that charlatan. Mayor Sinclair, pillar of the community and all round nice guy. A good man, the Eilidh Mail had reported, if only there were more like him. Huh. The trouble with this town was that there were too many like him. People you thought you knew, trusted, right up until they nearly destroyed everything you held dear.
Ted’s stomach churned, the blooms suddenly heavy in his hands. Flowers were for conveying sentiment, what sentiment did these convey? Regret? Shame? Love? The anger was already flaring in his stomach; an ember he knew would never completely die away. He should have felt shame for what he was about to do, here in the middle of St Cuthbert’s churchyard at the grave of his boy. And maybe he did feel something like that, but it wasn’t enough to stop Ted from taking the heads of those pretty, expensive, anonymous flowers and crushing them right there in his hands.
CHAPTER 9 (#ulink_39874d73-b4f9-5916-b43d-56e3ecb802ca)
The song on the radio. The birds outside. The sun warm through her windscreen. The tinny sound of the truck speakers. She was distantly aware of it all melting away, the tiredness pulling her under.
‘Alex? Can we put an apple on Rodolfo’s head? I can hit it, I promise!’
Alex turned her face towards Dill’s voice. The sun felt warm on her skin. She wanted to hear it again, a voice she’d accidentally forgotten. Like the taste of flavour left behind in childhood.
‘I’m a good shot, Al, honest.’
She glanced back over her shoulder and saw Finn’s smile mirroring her own. Dill was beating a path to the riverbank, swishing at the grasses with his new bow. Mum had tried to confiscate it like his cracker-bombs, this unexpected early birthday present from the mayor, no less.
Finn reached out and ruffled Dill’s scruffy straw-coloured hair. ‘Let’s check your aim first, Dill Pickle.’
Alex watched the dimple at Dill’s cheek pucker and disappear as his mouth moved with each concentrated swish of his bow. His features were changing, maybe he would become more like their dad after all, the soft rounded edges of his little-boyhood just beginning their surrender to the harder lines of adolescence.
Dill looked at the dog then threw Alex an angelic look, eyes squinting over cheeks risen with mischief.
‘Don’t try that butter wouldn’t melt thing on me, Dill,’ Alex laughed, ‘I saw you in action earlier. I’d stay out of Jem’s way for a while if I were you.’
Finn laughed. ‘What have you done at your sister now, buddy?’ Finn had paint spatters all over his shirt. Or was that mud? No matter, he’d turned it inside out anyway. Rodolfo woofed and very sensibly fell back to trot beside Finn’s legs, before Dill could do a William Tell on him.
‘Nothin’.’ Dill grinned.
‘You big fibber, Dill Pickle,’ Alex said. ‘Y’know how I can always tell when you’re fibbing?’
‘His lips move?’ Finn teased.
‘No.’ Alex bumped Finn with her shoulder. She looked back to Dill. ‘Your dimple gives you away, little brother.’
Dill gave in immediately. ‘I caught Jem snogging the bathroom mirror! The actual mirror!’ His nose wrinkled. ‘Ew, she’s so gross, she looked like the fish me and Dad caught when we went fishing in the plunge pools.’ Dill made a face, presumably of a fish gasping its last. ‘I think she needs more practice. Yeeuck.’
‘Jem is spending a lot of time in the bathroom, come to think of it.’ Alex bit at the smile on her lips. Finn let his own smile run a merry riot all over his face. Something floated inside Alex when she saw him do that.
‘Know much about snogging do you, bud? What are you, nine?’
Dill stopped swishing and jabbed his bow towards Alex. ‘I know you like to snog my sister,’ he grinned, ‘and if my dad catches you guys on the porch again, he told Mum he’s going to see how much you really like her, Finn, and tell you all the gross stuff Alex—’
Alex lunged. ‘Dill! God, shut up!’
Dill bolted. Alex was going to throttle him. No wonder Mum had asked her to take Dill out while Jem cooled off. Jem had been set to murder him back at the house.
Alex made a grab for him. Incapacitating Dillon with relentless armpit-tickling was probably one of her favourite things to do, second only to snogging Finn’s face off on the front porch.
‘One sister trying to kill you not enough, huh, Dill?’
Dill squealed in that way smaller children do when they’re being chased and The Fear has gotten a hold of them. She’d nearly got to him, but they were both giggling too much to effectively chase or flee from the other. Alex made a final lunge when something cumbersome, a black and tan furred lump of warmth scuttled beneath her knees sending her reeling into the grasses with a clumsy thud. Rodolfo whimpered. Dill looked on for about half a second before erupting into the same breathless laughter he was holding onto from his toddlerhood.
Rodolfo whimpered again. Alex whimpered too. ‘Bad dog, Rodolfo.’ She lifted an arm up to examine it and grimaced.
‘Hold on, don’t move!’ Finn was beating back the thicket of nettles with Dill’s bow. He looked kinda clumsy about it, Alex thought, but it felt sort of romantic. Totally worth the stings.
‘Don’t, Finn, you’ll get stung too!’ Like she meant that.
Finn slipped an arm beneath her back. Alex let him. Finn lifted her out of the nettle patch. Alex breathed in a hit of his warm skin and the body spray she didn’t think suited him but said she liked just the same because he was Finn, marvellously gorgeous, artistic, Finn.
‘You’re not going to snog now, are you?’ Dill drew one of his arrows from their sheath and held it out to them feathers first. ‘Cos if you are, can one of you please shoot me first? Don’t bother with the apple.’
Alex jolted awake to a short, sharp, unpleasant sound at her truck window. Dill disappeared from her mind leaving behind him only a dull echo of the stinging sensation Alex had felt creeping through her legs. More tapping at the passenger window pushed away those last wisps of Finn too.
Alex blinked. Kerring General loomed in the near distance. She pieced it together, remembered her mum, Jem’s call, the journey home. Alex rubbed the tiredness from her head. Finn. On the roadside. That bit hadn’t been a trippy dream. Alex shifted a little and felt an uncomfortable fuzziness sear through one of her calf muscles. Her legs were locked together awkwardly in the foot well, a tingling sensation raging all the way down into her feet.
Pins and needles, loony. Not nettle-rash. She tried to flex against it.
‘I knew you wouldn’t wait until morning.’ The voice was dampened by glass. Alex checked for drool at the corner of her lips and tried to see around the hand softly rapping fingers adorned with pretty rings against her passenger window. Jem had been a sandy blonde last Christmas, sporting a victory roll if memory served. The girl standing the other side of the glass was all long layers and choppy fringe in a shade much closer to the deep red Blythe had passed on to both of them. Dill had taken more of their dad’s features, their mum had said. More angular and fair. But mostly he hadn’t reminded Alex of either of their parents in particular.
Alex smiled through the glass. It regularly caught her off-guard how attractive Jem had become since emerging from her tomboy chrysalis. Without Dill, Alex’s theory couldn’t be properly measured, but she’d long suspected theirs was one of those families where the children had become progressively more beautiful as they’d come along. This morning though, Jem looked even more the butterfly than usual, striking and fragile all at once.
Alex reached across the passenger seat and pulled on the door handle. ‘Hey, stranger. What time is it?’ The car park had filled up since Alex had pulled into one of the far bays and dozed off.
Jem crouched down in the truck doorway. ‘Time you stopped sleeping with your mouth open? It’s eight-thirty, how long have you been here? Or shouldn’t I ask?’ She reached lithely over the passenger seat and pulled Alex’s head in for a kiss. The question was on Jem’s face before she could ask it. ‘Alex, have you been swimming?’
‘Not exactly.’ She wouldn’t call it swimming. Alex gave in to another yawn. ‘I haven’t been here that long, I don’t think. Couple of hours?’
‘Hope not, Al. They’re hot on the parking charges here, the thieving toads. Like anyone wants to be stuck at a hospital.’ Alex pulled her pumps back and grabbed her rucksack from the passenger foot well while Jem slammed the passenger door shut. Alex skipped to keep pace with her, glancing across the hospital car park as they walked. There was no sign of him. Jem pulled an expensive looking phone from the breast pocket of her denim jacket and checked the screen. ‘He went in already. I hung back to make a call, I didn’t spot you until after he’d gone inside,’ she said reassuringly. Jem returned her phone to her pocket, slipping her free arm around Alex’s waist. ‘Honest, Al, don’t go off on one … he didn’t know you were here or he’d have waited to say hi.’
‘OK.’ Alex smiled, trying not to leave such a tiny word hanging in the air all by itself. What had she been expecting anyway, a greeting party?
Something mildly panicky was rising through Alex’s body the closer they got to the main hospital entrance. She wasn’t ready. She didn’t have the words, for her mum or her dad. How did you apologise for finally putting your own mother in hospital? For being the root cause of her broken heart?
Jem nudged Alex with her hip. ‘So what’s this? The beach bum look?’
Alex glanced down at the denim cut-offs and faded Jaws t-shirt she’d yanked on in the middle of the night as the espressos took effect. ‘It wasn’t exactly a deliberate outfit.’
‘Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water?’ Jem read. ‘Keeping the fear alive, are we?’
Alex let out one of those breathy laughs that wasn’t worth the effort seeing as it wasn’t going to fool anyone. That fear was well and truly alive and kicking, like a great white killer shark, if great white killer sharks had legs. ‘Feels like ages since I last saw you, Al.’ Jem’s voice fell lower. ‘How are you doing?’ It wasn’t a good sign when Jem was quiet. It was like her defence mechanism. As if not talking about a thing could make it disappear.
‘I’m good.’ Alex smiled. It wasn’t Jem’s job to check on her, Alex was the eldest. She missed her role. ‘How are you doing, Jem?’ she countered, pulling Jem in to her a little as they walked past A&E. It was always a strange sensation Alex felt when they got together, as if it was possible to miss a person even more when they were within reach.
‘I’m OK. I’m just glad I was already up here and not still in London when Mal called. It was a bit of a shock, Alex. She didn’t look great last night. She didn’t look … like Mum.’ Alex’s throat narrowed as they crossed the hospital lobby. She should’ve done more to stop this from happening, somehow, instead of hiding from them all.
