Even I couldn’t argue with that logic.
‘I do like spending time with Luca,’ I admitted after a while, testing the thought out. ‘But the more I’m in his life, the less Joe’s in mine, and when I realised that being with him came at the expense of Joe disappearing, I felt .?.?.’ Alice waited, bobbing her head encouragingly. ‘I was scared.’
‘Right, now we’re getting somewhere!’ Alice declared, slapping the bed triumphantly. ‘Scared of what?’
‘Of losing him all over again.’
‘And?’
My voice had shrunk to barely more than a whisper, the tight ache of approaching tears at the back of my throat. ‘Of opening my heart again only for it to be shattered.’
Alice sat back, letting my words linger between us for a moment. Something inside me had come loose, the truth that I’d been holding on to tightly for so long unravelling around me like a ball of wool.
‘Jenny, there comes a point when we all have to let go. No one can hold on forever, and that doesn’t mean you love Joe any less or want to forget him, but the thing about looking back all the time is that you can’t see where you’re going. You’ll stumble and fall and hurt yourself over and over again, until the day you find you can’t get up anymore. And I can’t lose another friend, Jenny. Iwon’t.’ Alice’s bottom lip wobbled as she shook her head, her eyes rolling up towards the ceiling and blinking fast several times to curb the tears glistening behind her lashes. My heart ached for my friend, but there was guilt there too, tight and heavy as it dawned on me what it must have been like for her to get that page. Just like the one she’d gotten the night Joe was admitted.
‘Jenny! Sweetheart.’
I turned to see Mum barging her way through the door, her jet-black hair sticking out at all angles, her bar apron still double-knotted around her waist. ‘Oh, she’s sitting up. You’re sitting up.’ She sighed, her hand flying to her chest in relief as though the ability to sit at a ninety-degree-angle was a sure sign of a clean bill of health. ‘She’s sitting up, Jacob. She’s all right,’ she bellowed down the corridor as a wheezing Jacob appeared behind her, clutching the side of his chest with a pained expression on his face. His shoulders sagged with relief when he saw me, his small smile the only evidence of the silent conversation we shared without either of us saying a word.
‘Thank God, because I might need that hospital bed at this rate,’ he gasped, collapsing red-faced into the vacant chair beside the bed. Alice rolled her eyes at her brother’s dramatic entrance.
‘What happened, darling? Are you hurt?’ Mum asked, her forehead puckered with worry as she stroked my hair back from my face, the way she always did when I was young and came home with a grazed knee and a tear-stained face.
‘I’m fine, Mum, really.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t call three fractured ribs and five stitches fine,’ Alice muttered pointedly. Mum’s hand flew to her mouth in horror and I threw Alice a look that told her she wasn’t helping.
‘What’s all this Jacob was telling me on the drive over about you having –visions of Joe?’ Mum whispered, her eyes wide with worry as she pushed the already tightly tucked bedding further down the side of the bed. Both Alice and I turned to look at Jacob, whose cheeks turned an even deeper shade of beetroot.
‘I’m sorry, she practically forced it out of me,’ Jacob babbled apologetically. ‘Plied me with that Tupperware of biscuits she keeps in the glove compartment of her car.’
‘Ah yes, that well-known torture technique. I’m surprised you lived to tell the tale,’ Alice snorted, reaching over and flicking crumbs from the front of his shirt. Jacob swatted his sister’s hand away with an irritated scowl.
‘Is it true, Jenny? Have you been having these, these—’
‘Grief hallucinations,’ Alice finished as Mum floundered for the correct terminology.
Mum nodded, pointing at Alice. ‘Yes, those.’
I wriggled uncomfortably beneath the sheets, suddenly wanting very much to pull them up and over my head. ‘Yes,’ I admitted, my cheeks warming with embarrassment.
‘And how long has this been going on, exactly?’ She looked first at me, then at Alice, then at Jacob, who started whistling the tune of Radiohead’s ‘Creep’.
‘Since Joe’s funeral,’ Alice eventually answered.
‘That long?!’ Mum exclaimed, her teeth worrying at her bottom lip.
‘I thought you said they’d stopped?’ Jacob frowned.
‘She lied,’ Alice replied for me.
‘Oh, Jenny,’ Mum sighed, her hand coming to rest on my arm. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I could have helped.’
‘Sorry Jenny, I should never have said anything,’ Jacob prattled to my right. ‘It’s just that your mum can beverypersuasive when she wants to be—’
‘I thought I heard you talking to yourself in your room a few times, but I just assumed you were on the phone or something,’ Mum muttered, more to herself than me, her eyes shining with some newfound understanding as she connected the dots. I raked my fingers through my hair, wincing as my nail snagged against one of my stitches. It was too much, the questions coming at me from all sides, the heavy looks of concern like a weight pressing hard against my chest, making it difficult to breathe.
‘—and then she got the shortbread out,’ Jacob continued.
