Letting You Go

Alex watched the sparkles on the water. ‘Ain’t no thing but a chicken wing,’ she said aloud. It felt strange. Liberating. She’d read that in the Climb your fear-ladder article too. Face your fears and assertively tell them, ‘No! I will not be a slave to you any more!’

She locked eyes on the riverbank. ‘No’, she said in a small voice, ‘I will not—’

This was ridiculous. She was losing her mind. Alex let out a little laugh. Then she cleared her throat and tried it again. All this clean air was flushing something out of her, it felt kinda good. And weird. ‘Ain’t no thing but a chicken wing!’ she called, louder this time. The wall of evergreens called back with a small echo. There were only squirrels and, rumour had it, a headless ghost she might disturb back here. Sod it, call it coffee jitters but she was going to go for it. She’d see a car coming a mile off before anyone would hear.

She took another lungful. ‘AIN’T NO THING BUT A CHICKEN WING ON A STRING—’

‘From … Burger King?’

Alex snapped her head round to her right side. Her heart hurt, like it had a stitch. It might actually have just stopped.

The mud was the first thing. New toffee-coloured mud spattered across his jaw. She glanced up and down, scanning him for possibility.

Oh God. Oh my God.

Another pain in Alex’s chest. She felt the beating in there fire up again on all cylinders. This was why kids pedalled stories of headless ghosts in the forest, the mulchy floor spongy enough that any person with a half-decent pair of trainers and a degree of athletic grace (that was Alex out then) could suddenly, soundlessly appear from the woods and scare the crap out of you.

Finn looked stunned too.

Alex didn’t know where to look. The mud was a running theme. His trainers were caked in the stuff, so were the calf muscles glistening with tiny beads of sweat. He hadn’t been a runner in his youth. He hadn’t been so defined, either. She tried to take him all in. His chest was heaving beneath his t-shirt, fervently but steady, like a racehorse. A thin white wire trailed down from the headphones either side of his face giving the rise of his chest a glancing blow on its descent to one of the pockets of his jogging bottoms. Joggers cut off at the knees. He wasn’t just a runner now, he was a hardcore runner.

Alex was dumfounded. ‘You’ve … changed colour.’ Her voice caught in her throat. Maybe he didn’t notice. He’d appeared from the trees as fluently as he did in her sleep. Alex swallowed, her heart already migrating to her mouth. Finn gave a gentle yank and sent the earplugs tumbling towards his waist.

He looked down at himself. ‘I guess that would be mostly the mud.’

It wasn’t the mud, it was adventure seeking in the southern hemisphere while Alex had been making vats of chilli con carne at the food bank. He probably smelled of coconut oil and ylang ylang now, she usually smelled of fried onions and disinfectant. His hair had changed colour too, lighter at its edges than it was. It still sat long just over his ears but it looked more deliberate now, like he’d just fallen off a billboard advertising surfboards, or cranberry juice, or something full of antioxidants.

‘You haven’t changed colour.’ He smiled. ‘Still a striking red head.’ Alex cringed at her own statement. ‘Well, actually you look a little less red than the last time we spoke if I remember right.’ He offered a half-hearted smile.

She was going to die. Right here on the spot. The last time they’d spoken had been in her student bedroom. Trying to be quick, efficient, like ripping off a plaster, hadn’t worked. There had been nothing clean and clinical about it. Just lots of arguing and hurt. And red faces, obviously.

‘Actually, you look a little pale, Foster. Are you OK?’

She hadn’t heard her name on his lips since the last moments before watching him walk away through the snow. Be kind to yourself, Foster, he’d said. Because not having the balls to go home and tell her dad about them sure as hell wasn’t being very kind to Finn.

Alex swallowed again. Finn’s breath was levelling off but hers was becoming shallower. She felt a bit fuzzy, actually.

‘I, er. Actually just, I erm … just tired, actually. Long drive.’

Finn’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t want his eyes to narrow, he was always working something out when he did that.

‘Jem said you don’t come back here. Don’t they have fast food where you live now?’ Nope, he’d lost her. ‘Burger King, wasn’t it?’ Alex cringed. The woman on Oprah hadn’t sounded like such a muppet when she’d said it. ‘Or have you come back for a run in one of the most beautiful spots in the world? It’s some morning, isn’t it?’

She felt a hand rub up the back of her neck and realised it was her own. Stop that, you’re not a child.

‘No, no … definitely not a runner. Or prolific burger eater.’ She smiled feebly.

‘But you do come back up here to the Falls though? Evidently.’

Oh God, this conversation felt like swimming. In through the nose, out through the mouth …

‘Yeah, um, not really. It’s difficult with work and stuff and …’

‘Work?’

‘Yep. I erm, work with disadvantaged people.’ Disadvantaged people? Nice one, Alex. She wasn’t exactly in the Peace Corps. Don’t try to impress him, you plonker. He’s travelled the world!

‘Disadvantaged people? Must keep you busy.’

Alex laughed a laugh that didn’t belong to her.

‘I thought when you left your university degree, you’d find another course somewhere?’

‘Ah, no.’ Alex batted the notion away, a silly childhood whimsy. ‘No I didn’t, actually. I er, I left uni for good.’

‘I know.’ He said matter-of-factly. ‘That’s too bad. Your work, all through college, I mean … you have a gift, Foster.’ He shrugged.

Alex swallowed again. Only her mother said that. Have. Not had. As if there was still discernible potential in her somewhere. Alex looked at her shoes, embarrassed if anything. Mum would’ve loved this, this meeting of theirs in the forest like two star-crossed nymphs, back when Blythe’s heart would have been still up for the excitement. Reality thudded home. ‘Actually, I have to go. I need to get to the hospital.’

The look on Finn’s face switched immediately. ‘Are you OK, Foster?’

‘Oh, no … I didn’t mean … it’s Mum. She er, she had a stroke last night.’ The words seemed to double back in her mouth and head straight back down her throat, clenching her heart in an angry fist. Suddenly there was a lump forming at the back of Alex’s throat, she could feel it coming. Don’t cry! Shit! Alex, if you cry now he’ll comfort you and then you’ll be dripping snot into his muddy chest before you know it and it’ll be all over.

‘I’m sorry, Foster. Is there anything I can do?’ Finn’s hand reached out for a second and grazed Alex’s elbow. Their skin touched briefly and she very definitely felt it, the same as before, exactly as Blythe would always describe it.

It felt like lightning.

CHAPTER 7

Ted Foster had woken up an hour ago to the sound of muffled whimpers drifting in off the landing. For a few dazed seconds, he imagined he were still a young man, sitting bolt upright in bed ready to trudge wearily across the hall to check on each of his three children, see which one of them was having a restless dream. He stretched his back through and reached up to rub the greying bristles of his face, turning to see if Blythe had woken too. Her pillow was as neat and plumped as she’d left it yesterday morning after Jem had helped her change the beds. Blythe had been grumbling about engine oil finding its way onto the bedspread again. ‘Well what can I do,’ Ted had protested, ‘if some evenings I rush my shower because I can’t wait to climb into bed with a show-stoppin’ redhead?’ Jem had started grinning at her mother then but Blythe had turned that beautiful porcelain chin of hers away in mock disapproval.

God damn it, Blythe.

The dawn was finding its way along the top edge of the curtains, waiting respectfully to be invited in. Ted took his first deep breath of the day and set a hand on the piped edging of Blythe’s pillow. She’d disapprove of all the fuss last night. All those strangers talking over her with their penlights and charts, as if she weren’t there sleeping beneath them. They were just kids. What did they know about her? A woman whose laughter they’d never contracted, whose neck they’d never smelled, whose beautiful voice they’d never heard singing on a morning.

More impatient whimpering found its way through the gap under the bedroom door. Ted set two unwilling feet on the cool floorboards and went to find the source of all that disgruntlement. He quietly opened the door so as not to wake Jem down the hall. The door shushed open. Ted looked to his feet and the bundle of straw-coloured fur waiting expectantly there. The damned thing had sniffed him out and here it was, sitting there with its head cocked ready for breakfast no doubt.

‘Made it up the stairs then?’ This was their first Labrador, he’d heard they had more spring in them than most pups. Probably should’ve gotten something with less spring, not that he’d had any intention of having any more dogs, springy or not. The Cavern was an ale house, not a pet market. The damned thing had been what Blythe would call an impulse purchase, like half the stuff she’d bring home from the supermarket. Impulse purchase was about right. There it had been, all wide-eyed peeping out the top of Roger Muir’s coat. The runt, Muir had said. Ted knew instantly that Blythe would love it. Her face had lit up like one of the kids’ when she’d seen the pup, that smile she seemed to put her whole body into. A smile she didn’t have to think about. At this time of year to bring that smile back into the house was nothing short of a blessing.

The pup cocked her head the other way.

‘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.

2nd November 2006

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

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.