‘I don’t know what I want.’
‘You must know what you want or you wouldn’t want to talk about it while you pretended we’re talking about something else.’
‘Amy’ll come back,’ I say. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘She’ll definitely come back,’ Lola says, and flicks her eyes at the letter. ‘But maybe Henry does something different this time.’
I drive Martin home and lift the talking ban because I like Martin but also because he and Henry have become friends, and I’m wondering if they talk about Amy or me. I can’t ask him directly, but I’m hoping he’ll spill something by accident.
We discuss the cataloguing at first. Martin’s finding things in books too, but not like I am. He’s finding things people leave by mistake, the accidental histories of people.
Mostly, we talk about George on the way home this afternoon. He fills me in on what happened after the party, how they made up and then he blew it by telling her she had a problem. He’s been buying her coffee all week as an apology, and today he made progress. He does this double punch in the air that reminds me of Cal. ‘She smiled at me today when I handed over the coffee, so I asked her if maybe she wanted to meet up tonight and she said yes. We’re going out later. Just as friends, of course.’
‘Of course,’ I say.
He looks so excited that I feel like I should say something to him. If it were Cal sitting next to me, about to go out ‘as friends’ with a girl he really liked, I’d tell him to be careful. I don’t tell Martin that, though. It’s not like I’m being careful about my feelings for Henry.
I’m smiling when I walk into the restaurant, an Italian place not far from the warehouse. I’m looking forward to seeing Rose. She’s been working all week, and we’ve hardly had a chance to talk. I’m looking forward to seeing Henry. I liked helping Martin. I’m thinking about garlic bread and smiling even more when I see Mum sitting at the table with Rose.
‘Surprise! I missed you so much that I took the day off school,’ she says, in a voice that sounds falsely cheerful.
When I kiss her on the cheek, she tells me I smell nice. I feel guilty for finding the energy to use make-up and Rose’s perfume this morning.
‘You look happy,’ Mum says.
‘I had a good day,’ I tell her, and she smiles and says she’s glad. It feels as though she’s not glad, though, but I wonder if I’m imagining it. I reach for the bread and offer it around and Rose fills in the quiet that comes after by saying she’s heard great things about this restaurant.
‘Excuse me,’ Mum says quietly before she goes outside to have a cigarette.
‘She’s mad at me,’ I say to Rose, and she looks genuinely surprised.
‘Why would she be mad? You’re all she’s talked about since she arrived. But she made the mistake of meeting me at the ER.’
I look at her through the window and wonder if I will ever just go forwards, past all this, to being happy. I wonder if we go back again and again all our lives. Everything about her is different since Cal died. She was lean and strong before, muscles carved by the water.
‘Does it bother you?’ I ask Rose. ‘Don’t you think about Cal all day long, with the machines beeping and the people dying?’
‘I don’t think about Cal there, no.’
‘So you get used to it?’ I say. ‘Used to death?’
She pours a glass of wine. ‘I guess it’s that no two deaths are the same. It’d be terrible if they were.’
Rose changes the subject by quizzing me about the bookstore. I focus on her questions so I don’t stare at Mum after she comes back to the table. I tell them about the Letter Library and how Michael wants me to catalogue it before they sell.
‘It’ll go quick,’ Mum says, and Rose agrees the building is fantastic, and Mum shakes her head and says, ‘They won’t keep the building. They’ll knock it down to build flats. All around here flats are going up. Behind you at the warehouse, there’s another lot.’
It’s not Mum’s fault that the plan might be to demolish the shop. She’s right about the flats. But now I can’t stop thinking about the bookstore knocked down and gone. I’m almost certain the idea hasn’t occurred to Henry. He talks about the bookstore as though it’s passing into someone else’s hands, into the care of someone else who loves books.
‘Have you told people, about Cal?’ Mum asks.
‘I told Henry. I’m not planning on telling anyone else, though, just in case either of you run into Sophia.’
I’m expecting Rose to argue with me, to tell me it’s time. But she says she can’t say the words either. ‘Stupid, but I’ve only told my boss at St. Albert’s. I don’t want to think about it at work.’
The food arrives and Mum says Gran wants to know if I’ve gone through the box of Cal’s things that she gave to me before I left.
‘It’s still in the car,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll get to it, though.’
I think back to that family in the waiting room. I describe them to Rose, and she remembers. ‘It was the girl’s father,’ she says. ‘He’d been in a car accident.’
‘And?’ I ask.
‘And he was okay,’ Rose says, and Mum breathes out in relief.
It makes me feel better that Mum cares about that unknown family. Somehow it means that even though Cal’s death has changed both of us, it hasn’t changed us at our core. Mum and I were both there at the moment that Cal died, and sometimes I worry that seeing that has altered something so fundamental about us. I worry we lost some of our humanness that day, and it’s not coming back.
Henry
now she’s back, I feel more like me
Martin and I meet outside Shanghai Dumplings. He asks where George is, and I have to break it to him that she’s not coming. ‘It’s just you and me as it turns out.’
‘I thought it was a family tradition.’
‘I did too,’ I say, and try not to sound unhappy about it. I like Martin, but he’s not a substitute for my whole family.
While we wait for Mai Li to seat us, I think about the conversation Dad and I had earlier. Rachel and Martin had left, and George wasn’t around. He told me dinner was off tonight. ‘Your mum and I just don’t feel like it,’ he said. ‘George has gone to her place for dinner. I’m eating with Frederick and Frieda.’
He took some money from the petty cash so I could pay for Martin’s dinner, and gave it to me with a book he’d bought during the week.
The book is a Penguin Classics edition of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories. There are yellow butterflies on the cover, squarish wings fitting together to make a hexagon shape. Some butterflies are breaking off from the whole. ‘Read “Shakespeare’s Memory”,’ Dad suggested, and I promised that I would.
Dad introduced me to Borges’ short stories one night in Year 10 when I was looking for something to read. I’d finished Kelly Link’s The Wrong Grave and I loved the strangeness of the stories. I’d moved on to Karen Russell and loved those stories too, when Dad found me roaming around the bookshop in search of something else.