He slides onto the floor beside me. ‘Be with me.’
I search for my hate but it isn’t there. Perhaps it never was. Or maybe it was just a road I had to travel along, a country I needed to pass through to find the place where I belong.
I take the smoothie from him.
Put my hand in his.
There is shock, recognition, astonishment. Because in the cave of his hand, it feels like home.
From: Kit McDermott
12:39
But even an affair doesn’t make sense of it. It doesn’t explain the nightmares you wake up screaming from, or how you’ve never learnt to drive, or how you make excuses to get out of taking Millie to the playground. I told you once, that playgrounds are important, she needs to know where the boundaries of her body are, where she starts and where she ends and you looked at me like I’d slapped you. What makes sense of that?
My mind is exploding trying to figure this out. Cass said I need to stop writing to you, according to her, I’m not doing anything except message you all day and I sort of growled at her, told her it’s the only thing that makes me feel better.
But now, I think she’s right. I can’t keep this up.
So, this is my last one.
If you’re reading these messages, I want you to know, I’m sorry for what’s happened to us. I’m sorry we lost Faye.
I’m sorry if I haven’t loved you as much as I should, if I didn’t love you enough to ask you hard questions. But I’m not afraid anymore. Nothing you can say will frighten me. Because nothing is worse than not being with you. Come home.
52
Hit andRun
Then
This is how you die from a hit and run. The bumper of the car strikes your legs. You’re astounded that the words you learnt at school –speed,mass,velocity– are really talking about this. That your body, which always felt invincible when you ran into the sea or did a kick flip on your skateboard, simply surrenders. You didn’t realise metal was so absolute.
Your legs, already broken, are swept from under you as your torso contours to the car’s bonnet. Your ribcage cracks. You wish you’d kissed that girl at the school dance. You’re moving at the speed of the car now, everything inside you is moving at the speed of the car, all your soft organs, until, one by one, they’re halted by bruising, tears, ruptures.
Your head hits the windshield. Your skull fractures, you have a concussion, which you could come back from if your brain wasn’t already swelling. You want your mum.
The last thing you see through the glass of the windshield are the navy eyes of a stranger. You don’t know that, after a nightof what he thinks is food poisoning, he is looking for a girl. A girl who, at the very moment you die, is hundreds of miles away on a train. A girl who, after the man is arrested, will never stop researching hit and runs.
Later, when she is a lawyer, when she is pretending to be an adult and not the fourteen-year-old she feels like she is, she will use all her resources to find your name: James Saunders, seventeen. Just an innocent boy in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Collateral. You will be with her at the zeniths of her life and the nadirs – her abortion, her graduation, her wedding day, the birth of her first daughter, the loss of her second. No matter where she is or what she’s doing, she will see, in retinal flashes, the hundreds of collisions that pulled you apart. In all those moments, she desperately wants to say one thing to you: ‘I’m so sorry. You could never have seen him coming. No one could.’
PART IV
53
Drive
Now
It’s easy to slip into a younger version of myself, like sinking below the surface of warm water. In the passenger seat of his car, I roll down the window and hold my hand to the wind, watch its steadiness against the zip of motorbikes, cars, lorries. Tarmac clears my mind, no past behind, no future ahead.
That evening, he drove me to The Spitalfields. I gave him everything – address, room number, key card. He packed up all my things, slung my bag over his shoulder. It looked so small against his hip.
In the lobby, he took out his soft tan wallet, slid his credit card into the machine. I didn’t want him to pay, I had money, all that cash, but my mind had disconnected from my body, signals firing without being relayed. I couldn’t have put my hand in my rucksack and taken anything out. Couldn’t.
The only time I hesitated was outside, between the glass doors of The Spitalfields and the open door of his car, it felt so final, I am going away from Millie and Kit, this can’t be right, this isthe opposite of what I want.I rocked on my heels, whispering, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’
Daniel turned off the engine. He came round the car and crushed me to the dove-grey cotton of his shirt. Against him, I was speechless at the relief his body brought me, I can have this always now, even in broad daylight. He held me for so long that the breadth of his chest, the ram of his heart stopped feeling like the cracking open of a secret. It started feeling like a promise.