Chapter 97 Kier

97

Kier

Clínica de recupera??o, Portugal, October 2021

When the nurse walks in, Penn is behind her.

I can't take my eyes off him. His hair, freckles. The lopsided smile that redraws every part of his face.

As the nurse murmurs a few words, I'll leave you to it. Let me know if you need anything , he stops short of the chair by the window that's been my lifeline to the outside world these past months. Through it, I watch it all – clouds that swell and drift away, airplane trails that daub a line through the blue and then dissolve to nothing.

Once she's left the room, Penn moves towards me. ‘Shit,' he says hoarsely. ‘I never thought I'd get the chance to do this again.' All at once his head is against mine, his hands on my shoulders.

I breathe it all in, his skin smell. Aftershave. Soap.

It's almost too much.

My senses have become heightened in here. Not to the clinical smells – it's anything normal that catches me – the damp, sweet scent of Etta's neck, the smell of the ground outside, sunbaked earth, flowers.

‘I know,' I say into his hair. ‘I know.'

We stay, locked together a while until I'm forced to move, sharp bolts of pain jagging through me.

I hate it. On bad days it feels like I'm running against a strong wind – though I try to move forwards, it keeps pulling me back, physically, mentally.

‘Are you going to sit down, then, or aren't you planning on staying?' I gesture to the chair on my left, smile, but the joke doesn't land. My voice doesn't sound right. Like I'm trying too hard.

‘Not sure … the name on the door isn't yours, so I don't know if you're an impostor…' Smiling, he perches on the edge of the chair and puts his bag on the floor beside him. ‘So how are you doing? You look—'

‘A state?' I interrupt, bringing a hand up to the tangled mess of my hair. ‘You don't have to be nice. I look like crap, but I'm on the right track, at last. Still some rehab, physio, but I'm getting there.' Coming back to life after a long winter. That's how the doctor described it. Waking up.

‘Good. Bridie said it's been rough.'

‘In parts. This bit's been okay, but the start, I don't remember much. Those first few months, I was in a … coma.' I struggle to say the word. Talking about how bad it got – it's hard, something I've been working on, accepting what happened. Understanding it. ‘The middle bit was the worst. When I was aware of what was going on, knew I was meant to be better, but it didn't happen.' I blink. ‘It's been one complication after another. Infections, more operations …'

We're quiet for a few moments, but it isn't real silence. It's never quiet in here. Constant low-level noise: the rattle of the air-conditioning; clatter-shakes of drinks trollies wheeling past the room.

‘And how about you?'

A heavy silence falls. ‘Not great,' he says eventually. I get the sense he's holding back, but I don't push. Awkward under my scrutiny, he bends down to rummage in his bag. ‘Before I forget, I'm under strict instructions to give you these.' Holding a small bunch of slightly limp wildflowers, he passes them to me. ‘They're from Etta. Romy helped her wrap them.'

‘Etta.' I can't help but smile.

‘She looks like you, you know,' Penn says softly. ‘It's the eyes.'

Blinking, I reach for my water glass. Unwrapping the damp tissue around the flowers, I plunge the stems into the water and loosely arrange them.

Penn watches. Both of us are delaying the inevitable, but I want it over with, done.

In the end, it's him who speaks first. ‘Kier, I—' His voice splinters. ‘Look, we don't have to talk about it, not if you're not ready, but I wanted you to know that I'm sorry for not listening when I should have. For not being there.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Back in Devon.' Penn's face is serious. ‘I was so consumed in the wedding that I didn't listen when you said someone was watching you. I should have.'

It takes a while for me to digest his words. I've thought about this a lot. Sliding doors. Whether this, or another moment, could have stopped what was coming in its tracks.

‘I think,' I say carefully, ‘that the decision I made, to give it another go with Zeph, would have happened anyway. If not then, then another time. I needed to find out for myself who he was. Nothing you could have done would have changed that.'

Even now, I know I'd make the same decision over and over, because I wanted, so badly, for Zeph to prove to me that he was still the man that I first met. The man who believed we could fly. The man who could conjure food from words, from the very air.

We're both quiet for a minute, and it isn't loaded, I know he's not expecting anything from me in return, but I need to explain. ‘Look, I'm sorry too. For not getting in touch sooner, letting you know I was okay. '

He gives me a crooked smile. ‘You don't have to apologise. Everything that's happened, you weren't exactly in a fit state to be catching up.'

‘Yeah, but the past few months I have been. I've tried, you know, even picked up the phone, but I couldn't … get there. All I could think about was your job. Putting you in a shitty position.' I swallow, finding it hard to say the words. ‘And I knew that if you called it in, Zeph's family would have had to be told. I couldn't take that risk. Not with—'

‘Etta?'

I nod. ‘Not while I was still in here and there was a chance of another complication. Knowing I wouldn't be able to advocate for myself…' The thought still chills me. Someone from his world, a world that had damaged him so acutely, being able to take her from me.

I hesitate, working out how to say the next point.

Penn's studying me. ‘You okay?'

Dragging my gaze up to meet his, I look him properly in the eye for the first time. I feel a sudden tightening in my chest, a strange mixture of emotions rushing to the surface. Love, relief, but also fear.

Despite everything he's said, I'm frightened. I'm frightened that now he knows what happened with Zeph, he's going to think differently of me.

I steel myself, nod. ‘Part of the reason I've been worried about getting in touch wasn't just your job. I was scared … scared of what you'd think of me. If you'd see me like we used to see Mum.' I search his face, then search again, looking for some kind of echo of what I saw back then, but there's nothing. No judgement.

‘I never believed that,' Penn says fiercely. ‘With Mum at the beginning maybe, because of how Dad messed with our minds, but not now, never you.'

As he leans across and takes my hand, I feel the hard kernel of fear that's lived inside me for so long start to dissolve. ‘There's something I wanted to give you,' I say. ‘Ever since I knew you were here.' With his hand still in mine, I rummage in the drawer with the other, pass him a piece of paper. A piece of paper that's been by my side ever since I drew it that night. ‘I made this in case anything happened to me. Places I hoped you'd take Etta in the future.'

Letting go of my hand, he unfolds it, takes a sudden pull of breath. ‘A map … It's beautiful, Kier.'

This map is in pencil – black and white – and less finished than the others, but I've tried to put everything on there. Everything that matters. ‘It's not a map of one particular place, like the others, it's all of them, combined. All the places that are really special to me.' I run my finger over the paper. ‘That's the cove where we learnt to swim. The bonfire field. Some of them are places from other maps I've sent you. Sri Lanka. France.'

Penn doesn't say anything for a minute, then blinks. ‘When you're better, we can do these together. Take Etta.'

‘We can, but it's my last map, I think, for a while.'

‘You're not going to do any more?'

I shake my head. ‘Making this one … it felt … different. I wanted to do it for you, in case something happened to me, but that urge I've always felt to make them … it's gone.' I look at him. ‘Do you remember you asked me before your wedding why I couldn't settle?'

He nods.

‘What I told you … it wasn't quite true. I think all the travelling I did was a way of running, you know, running from what I thought I might become.'

‘The monster's daughter?' His voice is barely a whisper.

‘Yeah, and I think I was looking for something too.' I run a finger across the map. ‘I think I was looking for the happiness we had on that first map. The happiness we had because we were with Mum. The Mum before it all happened.'

Penn steeples his fingers, presses the tips together so hard the ends turn white.

‘I think every place I've mapped since has been a way of trying to find her again, the Mum before she did what she did.' I struggle to keep my voice steady. ‘Part of me thought that if I looked hard enough, she might be out there somewhere, Penn, but I could never find her, never find that happiness again.'

‘Kier, we should have talked about it. I didn't realise—'

‘I know, but it doesn't matter, because I get it now. Mum … she was there all along, wasn't she? I just had to pluck up the courage to see her.'

His eyes slowly trace my face. ‘You were …' – he hesitates, as if looking for the right word – ‘frightened to, before, weren't you?'

‘Yeah.' There's a catch in my throat. ‘But since I've been out here, I'm not any more. I know the monster wasn't inside Mum any more than it was in me. It was in them, wasn't it? Dad, and Zeph.'

An expression flits across Penn's face that I can't decipher: something like hope and fear, combined. ‘I knew you were struggling with that, but it wasn't just the whole monster thing, was it?' he says carefully. ‘You blocked Mum out because of what she did, in prison. Taking her own life.'

I know where he's going with those words, and for the first time ever, I don't shut him down. Block him out.

‘Yeah, I did. I always thought she chose to leave us, Penn, but it wasn't a choice, I get that now.' I hesitate. ‘One of the places I painted on the map Elin found was a waterfall in the park called Suicide Falls. One day, I was chatting to someone there whose brother had committed suicide. They told me they'd read a book describing what it felt like to want to take your own life. It said …' I try to keep my voice level. ‘It said something like no one leaps to their death from a burning building by choice. The person jumps because the flames are worse, a terror way beyond falling .'

He visibly swallows. ‘That's a good way of looking at it.'

‘And you know, that night, after I spoke to him, I dreamt of Mum for the first time in ages.' I clear my throat. ‘I realised then that I can stop looking, Penn. I can stop looking because she's always been there. Everywhere we go.'

His throat bobs again, and he's quiet for a minute before he says, ‘Does that mean you're not going to travel any more? '

I nod. ‘One day, I want to go with you and Etta to all those places on the map, but for now, I want to stay put for a bit.'

Hope flares, clear now, in his eyes. ‘Back in Devon?'

‘Yeah,' I say after a beat. ‘Back in Devon. You and me and Etta.'

As he puts his hand over mine, I think about what Zeph used to say to me.

We're going to fly, Kier. You and me, we're going to fly.

I don't need to fly, I think, looking at Penn. In fact, it's the last thing I want to do.

I want to settle, feel the soil grow warm beneath my feet. Stay a while.