“I’ll never not be. And what about him?” I said. “I worry about him. How he is feeling. He’ll be so lonely, Henry. He’ll be the loneliest.”
Henry sighed. He patted my arm. “Didn’t he tell you that he’s always known you?”
“Yes.”
“Did he tell you he’s found you before? The other times you met?”
“Yes,” I said. “He told me.”
“And did you know that he was there? At the time?”
“No, of course not. I didn’t know him until this time.”
“So how can you be sure that he’s not here right now?” Henry said. “I mean, here, in this room, right now, for the smallest possible fraction of a second? How could you know that he will never be with you again?”
“Is that possible?”
Henry laughed, just a little. “You and I both know for a fact that everything is.”
“You promise?” I said.
“Trust me, Jude,” Henry Lake said. “The worst has already happened and you are still here. Still breathing. You did the right thing.”
I was quiet then. I hated how awful doing the right thing made me feel.
“Those pins on the map,” he said. “They were places Dulcie and I could only talk about, at the end. Could only dream about seeing. The grief she felt, every day, when she saw what was going to happen to me, without her. I had her. A whole lifetime. And now I’m stuck. I can never move. Never change. Only grow older and never die. And I would do it again. I would give her everything. I had no choice. But she did. She just didn’t know what it would cost me.”
I listened. I wanted what he said to filter through what had set inside me, like the way water drips through rock and changes it. I wondered if it would take as long.
“The catch,” I said. “The downside.”
“Novo came for you,” Henry said. “He would have given up his life. Same as I have. But you saved him, Jude. You saved him. You freed him. And yourself too. I have never been prouder of anything or anyone in my endless life. And one day, yes, I promise, because of that, you are going to be fine.”
TWENTY-SIX
Henry Lake was right. Of course he was. I survived the equation of love plus loss. I am fine. I’m still here. Still bleeding. It starts off in a parallel place, recovery. Like when you’re lying in bed and everything is bone-heavy and the sky has no business being blue and you don’t see the point of any of it but you picture yourself, a part of yourself, getting up and eating breakfast and getting on with your day like you ought to, and then one day you do it. One day you actually do.
He offered me a way out before I wanted one.
“I’m a rich man,” he told me, a few months after Novo, when everything still felt like a bruise and it was all I could do to get out of bed in the afternoon and put one foot in front of the other. “I’m a rich man with nowhere to go. All I have are these pins on a map. When you’re ready, if you are ever ready, come to me and I’ll help. We can plan your next adventure.”
There was a morning.
I walked out of town alone on the coast path and when it got narrow I put one foot in front of the other and I smiled to myself that I could do this, that I had come this far without Novo and that this was happening. Life was happening again. Just to me. On my own.
Up at the top, a different wind bit and different old people sat in the still dim of their cars, looking out at the view. The ice-cream van hunkered down against the cold blasts, its generator humming and grumbling. I ducked round the side of it in the little carpark, climbed over the fence, and half slid, half scrambled down that same path to the wide gray ledge flecked with bird shit.
The sea to my left was vast and quick and rhythmic, and below me it rolled and slapped with the same rhythm, the whole world on a loop, filling and receding in that narrow deep well, that perfect blue-green O that Novo had brought me to, backlit by pale sand, like the seabed itself was a source of light.
I was scared this time, because I was alone, and he couldn’t save me. But I pretended not to be. I told myself I wasn’t. I told myself that the time with him in it was still happening somewhere. We were still in it. I could be without him, be without the object of love and still have the love. Mine to keep. That’s what I told myself.
I leaned into the void and instead of diving I jumped and the water when I hit it was still the earsplitting cold of feedback and sheet ice and sharp metal. And my heart stopped, my chest locked, and my brain seized, and I thought again, I have forgotten how to breathe, if I was thinking anything at all. And then like a cork I came back to the surface and the ear split was my own voice this time, laughing and squealing, shouting at all of it, telling myself, “Again! Again! Oh my GOD, Jude! AMAZING. Let’s do it again!”
And that’s when I knew that I could go anywhere. Be anywhere. And that I had to. Because by letting him go, I had set us both free. Both of us. Not just Novo. And that freedom is the antidote to heartbreak. The only known cure.
I went straight home to tell Henry, and Mum was on her way out to work. A changed woman, my mum. A good job. A town full of friends. This last move had been the best thing for her.
“Good swim?” she said, messing up my salty hair. “The suntan on you, Jude. You look good. You’re looking better.”
“I’ll walk with you,” I said, and she put her arm around my waist, and we went down the path together and opened the gate. Across the road, Mrs. Midler’s house had new owners. They didn’t know a magic boy had scaled the face of it like a lizard. They had no idea I had watched him sit on the highest windowsill, and followed him into town, and that everything else had sprung from that moment, everything I felt and thought and was.
“What’s your plan?” Mum said, and she meant, like, that afternoon, but I told her anyway.
“I’m going away,” I said.
“Really? Where?”
“You know. Traveling. I want to see some World.”
She looked at me for a second. “Good idea.”
Passed the war memorial and the charity shop. Mum smiled at me. “Henry will be pleased,” she said.
“What did he tell you?”
“He’s been waiting,” she said. “He wants to help you.”
And that was it. It was that easy. When I started out, I was just walking. I had no idea what I was doing, honestly, only a need to shut the door behind me and go, because it was time, now I’d decided, to get on with the business of living. Mum and Henry waved me off at the door, still drinking the champagne that Mum had splurged on, her chanting, “Postcards, postcards, POSTCARDS!” at me, all the way up to the corner of the road, where I turned and waved, and blew kisses and stepped on my own out into the world and kept going.