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Chapters (40)
  1. also by simon van booy
  2. the presence of absence
  3. Title Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. Prologue
  7. the presence of absence
  8. Part One
  9. 27.
  10. 26.
  11. 25.
  12. 24.
  13. 23.
  14. 22.
  15. 21.
  16. 20.
  17. 19.
  18. 18.
  19. 17.
  20. 16.
  21. 15.
  22. 14.
  23. 13.
  24. 12.
  25. 11.
  26. 10.
  27. 9.
  28. 8.
  29. 7.
  30. 6.
  31. 5.
  32. 4.
  33. 3.
  34. 2.
  35. 1.
  36. [quick black]
  37. [scene change]
  38. Part Two
  39. acknowledgments
  40. a note about the author

I replied that I wasn’t but hoped to see her at the weekend. This was true but also a lie.

On my second day at the cottage, I woke up with no sense of where I was or what had happened. Then I felt the thump of waves beyond the hedgerow and the previous day’s news broke over me, drenching the bed, flooding the bedroom with a silent, churning panic.

The thought occurred to me that I should kill myself, erroneously thinking it might solve everything, when actually it would make things infinitely worse for her. In addition to grief would be guilt⁠—which, like an anchor, she would drag through the rest of her life.

Not the legacy I wished to leave.

15.

You might be wondering about relations, where they come into all this. We had friends of course (though Hadley and I were each other’s best friends) but there was no extended family. My parents divorced when I was in my first year of university. My mother went back to Jamaica and died a decade later at her cousin’s house in Montego Bay from a hemorrhagic stroke. The funeral was bright and somewhat happy⁠—not what Hadley and I expected at all. After the divorce, my father went on to have another family⁠—and, at the insistence of his new wife, gave up contact with anyone he knew (or loved) before they met. Last I heard he was accounting in Glasgow.

Hadley’s mother succumbed to Alzheimer’s in her late-sixties and died with no idea who she was or that she had a daughter. In the early years of the disease, she would even forget what had happened with her husband, and sit waiting for him to come home with a plate of dinner in the oven.

Anyway, we got through it all together as we had every tragedy since Hadley was thirteen, which was when we had our first serious conversation.

On my way to the chemistry block, school bag in hand, I heard something from the bicycle sheds and went to look. It was teenage Hadley. Completely alone. She saw it was me and didn’t turn away. I approached and she held out a hand, which I took and cupped like an injured bird. The skin around her eyes was streaked with red from where she’d wiped the tears with her sleeve. You won’t believe this, but teenage me put my arms around teenage Hadley. I remember the synthetic wool of her green school cardigan, the warmth and pliable softness of her body underneath. I knew what had happened, of course. Everyone in school was talking about how her father had crashed his car into the village sweet shop⁠—though it was the heart attack before that killed him.