The House of Memories (10 page)

“Ella, sit down again, please. You must move beyond the blame. You’re not only hurting yourself through your anger; you’re hurting—”

I didn’t hear the rest. I left and I didn’t return. She was wrong; I knew that. There are no stages to grief. It’s just an all-encompassing, constant, complete, irreversible feeling. It’s there the moment you wake and there, right beside you, as you try to sleep. It’s like being soaked in hurt and pain and sorrow, as if you have been steeped in it for days, weeks and months, so that it has infiltrated every inch of your skin, into your bones, your blood. Grief becomes you. You become the grief. That was what the counselor didn’t know. I couldn’t move beyond it because I had become it. All I could do now, all I had been trying to do since that day, was live with it. Live without Felix.

I don’t know how much time passed, whether I sat crying at Lucas’s desk for minutes or closer to an hour. I began to notice the scratching of birds’ feet on the roof above me. I heard the faint sound of traffic through the open window. I felt exhausted, as I always did after tears, my chest aching, my heart aching, but even as I sat there, at Lucas’s desk, trying to breathe properly, focusing on my inhalation, my exhalation, trying all the tricks I’d learned, I slowly became aware of a new feeling somewhere deep inside me. An unaccustomed one.

I felt safe.

Safer than I had felt for months. As if perhaps I could let my guard down in this house, in London, with Lucas. As if I could breathe more freely here. As if I could stay here, even for a little while.

“Stay for as long as you need, Ella,” Lucas had said. “Whether you take the job or not.”

If I did say yes, the job would take up thinking time. It would give me something to do. That was what I needed more than anything, every minute of every day and every night. Something to do. Something to stop me dwelling on things I couldn’t bear to think about.

I opened the folders again, leafing through the pages on the tutors, trying to make a decision. If I didn’t take the job, what would I do? Stay in London for a week or two? Or go back home to Australia? I imagined being back in Melbourne. I pictured visiting Mum and Walter in their new, large South Yarra house, hearing about their busy lives, the TV show, the interviews, the media attention. Mum pretending it drove her crazy, when she adored every minute of it. And before long, I knew, they’d talk about Jess, how well she was doing, what a big star she was becoming—

I couldn’t hear about Jess.

Could I go somewhere else in Australia? Back to Canberra? Never. Sydney? No. Aidan was in Sydney now. He’d moved there from Canberra, after getting a job as a translator with SBS, the multicultural TV station. Charlie had told me. Charlie had sent me regular updates on him, and on Jess, until I’d asked him to stop. He hadn’t been happy about it, even when I did my best to explain why. I couldn’t hear about either of them. I couldn’t hear that they were back at work again, leading normal lives. In Jess’s case, getting more and more famous every week. I couldn’t hear that they had somehow managed to piece their lives back together, rebuild, reinvent themselves. I couldn’t understand how it was possible.

“Just talk to them,” Charlie had begged once during one of our phone calls. In the early days, after he’d returned home from Felix’s funeral, he’d rung from Boston nearly every day. I couldn’t have done without his calls, but I didn’t always like what he had to say. “Please, Ella. Even just speak to Jess on the phone, if it’s too much to see her. She needs to talk to you.”

“I can’t, Charlie. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

“Is this to punish her even more? You don’t think she’s punishing herself already?”

I didn’t reply. I heard him sigh down the phone. A moment’s pause, then he tried again.

“Then you have to talk to Aidan at least. You can’t just leave it with him the way you did, walking out on him like that, out of the blue. You’re torturing him.”

“I didn’t walk out. I had to leave, Charlie. He knows why. You know why.”

“He was Felix’s father. He loved him as much as you did. Please, just see him, talk to him—”

I couldn’t. I couldn’t see him or talk to him again. The more time passed, the more sure of that fact I was. “Has he asked you to call me?”

“Yes, of course he has. He’s tried every way he can to get in touch with you. Because you’ve refused to answer any of his phone calls or letters or e-mail.”

I stayed quiet again.

“Ella, please, for my sake if not his. He’s not just your husband. He’s my friend. It’s killing me to see what’s happened to you both.”

His poor choice of word hung between us. I let it go. “I can’t, Charlie. I’m sorry.”

Over the following months, Charlie kept trying. Eventually, he stopped. He told me he wasn’t happy about it, but that he wouldn’t let me lock him out as well as everyone else. That hurt. I wasn’t deliberately locking anyone out. I had no choice. Surely he could see that.

Charlie stopped mentioning Aidan but the e-mail messages kept coming. So did his letters. I didn’t open them. I didn’t need to. I knew what they said.
Please, Ella, talk to me.
But I couldn’t.

Before it happened, Aidan and I could talk for hours. We did talk for hours. After it happened, after the first few days, after the shock and the tears, after the funeral, I made him tell me, again and again, in minute detail, over and over, exactly what had happened. I had to hear it until it felt as though I’d been there myself.

With every cell in my body, I wanted to have been there myself. All I wanted, all I craved, was to somehow change the ending to the story, to stop it happening, to be there close enough to call out at the split second that Felix started to fall, “Jess, catch him!” And she would somehow hear me and she would turn in time, drop the phone and with lightning speed reach out with both hands to grab hold of Felix. “Got you!” she’d say, and he would give that little gasp he gave when he’d had a bit of a fright. Jess’s eyes would open wide and she’d hold him tight and give a shaky laugh and say, “Wow, that was close!” And she’d put him carefully, gently, onto the ground, and lean and kiss his forehead or the top of his glossy black head. Or ruffle his hair, like I loved to do. Then they would walk home to the apartment, hand in hand, and she would make him a drink. Less than an hour later, Walter and Mum would get there too, and shower him with presents, and exclaim how big he’d grown in just a month or two, and wasn’t his voice beautiful. Were they imagining it or did he have a bit of an Irish accent? And then Aidan would arrive back from the trade talks, and be just changing out of his suit and pouring a drink for everyone when I got home from my day in town, so relaxed, my face shining from the unexpected, wonderful facial, my body supple from the massage. As soon as he heard the door open, Felix would run to me, his arms up in the air, urging me to pick him up, shouting, “I’m Felix O’Hanlon!” in toddler-speak. We’d all laugh. I’d look around the crowded living room. “What a surprise. I thought we were meeting at the hotel!” I’d be so relaxed that Jess and I would quickly forget the argument we’d had last time she’d visited and then the six of us would go on to have a great night out together for Walter’s birthday, before Aidan and I brought Felix home, still awake but falling asleep in our arms, and we’d put him to bed and then pour ourselves a drink, and talk about his work and my day and how lucky it was that Jess was able to step in to babysit, and we’d discuss the night we’d had and marvel again at Mum’s growing fame, perhaps even laugh that she’d been asked for autographs twice that night in the restaurant—who would ever have believed it?—and then we’d check that Felix was fast asleep and go to bed ourselves and we would all live happily ever after.

But that was not what happened. There was no happy ending. No matter how many times I collected the details from Aidan, in fragments, tiny pieces of the puzzle, putting them together until I could replay the whole scene in the park as though I had been there, watching it unfold, I could never change it. I could never prevent it from happening.

“It was instant, Ella. He died instantly.”

Aidan was wrong. The coroner’s report gave me all the detail I would ever want, detail I never wanted to read again. I learned terms I still wish I didn’t know. Medical names for the delicate bones in a twenty-month-old boy’s skull. The injuries caused when stone meets twenty-month-old bone and skin and blood vessels and nerve endings. It wasn’t instant. It took several minutes.

What did my baby feel during those minutes? Agony? Shock? Fear? Were my Felix’s last moments on earth filled with the worst pain he’d ever felt? Did his life flash past him? How could it? How could it, when he’d only had such a short life, had only started his life? And I wasn’t there. My baby was dying, there in the sun, on the ground, and I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there.

It’s not just Jess and Aidan I can’t forgive. I can’t forgive myself.

Aidan knows how I feel. In the days before I left, I said it to him. I’m sure I said it to him. All we did was say the same things over and again, relive what had happened. It was all there was to talk about and we talked about it until we were hollowed by the words, until our apartment felt full of our own grief, the blame, the guilt, as if our pain had pushed out all the air.

I said it all to him in my note.
We can’t stay together after what’s happened. Good-bye.
They were the hardest and the easiest words I had ever written. They were the truth. I couldn’t help him any more than he could help me.

He wouldn’t accept it, though. After I left Canberra, I moved to Melbourne for a few months and then up to Sydney. It was before he moved there. I picked up any work I could, cleaning, waitressing. I didn’t care what I did. I just had to keep moving. One Saturday, about four months after we had last spoken, after I’d done all I could to ignore the letters and e-mail from him, I had what I can only describe as a premonition. A feeling that Aidan was near.

I was living and working in Banksia, an outer suburb, beyond the airport, far from the harbor or the fashionable inner-city suburbs. I barely noticed my surroundings. All I did was work, walk and sleep, moving between the restaurant I worked in and my cheap flat. I’d asked Charlie not to give Aidan my new address. He didn’t. He gave him the address of the restaurant instead.

That Saturday, one of the other waitresses and I were setting the tables for a birthday lunch when I suddenly felt that Aidan was nearby. I still can’t explain how I knew. I put down the tray of cutlery, walked across to the large front window and peered through the wooden blinds. He was standing across the street, looking down at his phone. He was rereading the message from Charlie, I guessed afterward. The message with the address. I felt a rush of anger at Charlie, panic about seeing Aidan, then sudden anger at him too for finding me. As I watched, he put his phone into his pocket and started to cross the road.

I ran away. I’m not proud of it, but I had to. I didn’t want there to be a scene. I didn’t want my employers and colleagues to know anything about me, or my life before I’d started working there. I went out through the kitchen, out the back door, through the yard past the rubbish bins, out the creaking gate, and I ran, down the alleys, down the suburban streets and past a football oval. I didn’t stop until I was more than a kilometer away. I wasn’t sure where I was but it didn’t matter. After catching my breath, after making sure my voice sounded as normal as possible, I took out my phone and dialed the restaurant. The other waitress answered. I got in first. “Mandy, it’s Ella. Don’t say my name. He can’t know it’s me. Is he still there?”

There was a cautious “Yes.”

“Please, Mandy, help me. Can you talk without him hearing?”

There was a pause before she spoke in a formal voice. “I think so. I’ll check in the kitchen for you.” A moment later she spoke again in her normal tone. “Ella, what’s going on? Who is he? He said he’s not leaving until he talks to you. He says he’s your husband.”

I thought quickly. “Of course he’s not my husband. He’s an ex-boyfriend. I broke up with him a year ago and he’s been stalking me ever since. Mandy, please tell him I’ve gone home sick. Tell him I’ve left for the day and you don’t know how long I’ll be off work.”

“He doesn’t seem like a stalker. He just seems very upset.”

“Please, Mandy. I’ll owe you.”

She sighed and then told me she’d ring me back once he’d left.

Nearly an hour passed before she rang. I waited another hour before I returned to the restaurant. The birthday lunch was in full swing. Mandy wasn’t happy. While we were cleaning up afterward, I invented an elaborate story. Aidan hadn’t said much to her, thankfully. I told her that I’d broken up with him but he wouldn’t accept it. I’d moved three times, and he’d managed to find me every time.

“You should call the police, Ella. If it’s been that bad, you really should report him.”

“I will when I get home,” I said. Then I couldn’t help myself. “How was he?”

“How was he?” She stared at me.

“I just meant, how did he seem to you?”

“Honestly?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Gorgeous,” she said with a sudden grin. “Great accent. Beautiful eyes. If you don’t want him, can I have him? He can stalk me anytime he wants.”

I resigned the next day. Two weeks later I heard about the winery job in Western Australia. I was there a month before I told Charlie I’d left Sydney. I made him promise not to give Aidan the name of the winery, or even tell him I was now in Western Australia. Reluctantly, eventually, and only after another spirited exchange of e-mail, Charlie agreed. But he wasn’t happy with me.

Neither was my mother. “You have to help us to help you, Ella, please,” she’d said during one phone call. “You can’t keep running away from everyone, not just Aidan and Jess, but the whole situation.”

The whole “situation”? It wasn’t a “situation.” It was my life now. She didn’t understand, I realized. I wasn’t running away from anything. Everywhere I went, my pain came too.

Her voice softened. “Darling, please, talk to us. We have to get through this together. I was talking to Dr. Rob today. You know, the TV psychiatrist. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen him. He has a slot on the network’s chat show. People ring in with their problems and he’s so lovely and so knowledgeable. . . . Anyway, I told him all about what had happened and he was so sad for us, and so sympathetic, and he said that what you need to do is—”