“Nowhere else to go.”
Outside, the sky was darkening, the sound of the surf louder, as if it was encroaching. “May I?” said Laurie, putting on some latex gloves from the first aid kit.
Randall nodded, wincing as Laurie checked the swelling on his face, the tear on his ear. He felt insubstantial to her, so light and frail a breeze might carry him away. “Nothing appears to be broken, but you should get that ear seen to. How do you feel?”
“I’m fine,” said Randall, smiling.
“Any dizziness?”
“I’m fine, thank you for your concern.”
Laurie took a last look around the house. It was hard to imagine David living here as a child. Harder still to accept the old man standing in the kitchen area was his father. Curiosity got the best of her and she picked up a framed photograph from the dust-filmed sideboard. She wiped the glass, and an image of David as a teenager, standing next to his parents, emerged behind the dust. He looked so happy, his smiling face an almost perfect younger version of the smiling man standing next to him.
“He was about fifteen then,” said Randall, returning from the stove. “That’s the little beach up the way. He used to go swimming there every day. Does he still swim?”
“Yes, he loves swimming. We both do,” said Laurie, forgetting herself. “I have to get going,” she said, placing the picture back.
“You’ll tell him you saw me?”
Laurie saw such pain and hope in the old man’s eyes that she had to look away. “I’ll tell him.”
“OK then. Well, it was lovely to meet you properly after all this time,” said Randall, walking her to the door.
Laurie turned to face her father-in-law. Instinct made her want to return the compliment but she faltered. “You look after yourself,” she said, turning and heading back through the clearing toward her truck.
FALL
Chapter Three
Laurie edged closer and closer to the shore, her limbs acting under their own volition. She’d been running for seventy minutes now and hadn’t planned to stay out so long. When she’d left the apartment, she’d had no destination in mind. She’d simply wanted to escape the silence, to enter a different type of solitude: one of her own choosing. David had grunted in response as she’d said goodbye, not lifting his head above the sports section of the newspaper. Outside, she had started running and hadn’t stopped. Now she found herself down on the sand, not completely sure how she’d reached this spot.
Such was her level of fitness her body worked on autopilot. She plowed through the damp sand with no thought, her heartbeat faster than resting but steady. Even the music in her earphones didn’t really register. She was in a void and at that moment she felt as if she could run forever.
The argument had started last night. They’d both had a glass of wine and she’d tried to initiate something between them. She’d placed her hand on David’s thigh as she’d leaned in for a kiss, only for his whole body to stiffen as if a spider had run across his chest.
“Jesus, David, do I repulse you that much?”
At least he’d had the good grace to be embarrassed. “Don’t be stupid,” he’d said, but his heart hadn’t been in it.
“How am I being stupid? You flinched when I touched you. Actually flinched.”
“I’m just not in the mood.”
“Not in the mood? I wanted to kiss you, not fuck you.”
David met her eyes. It had been over a year since they’d last had sex. The first few months had slipped by unnoticed, both of them too engulfed in grief for it to even be a consideration, and soon, unwittingly, it became a thing. It wasn’t just the sex. Laurie missed the intimacy. Before, they would spend every evening on the sofa watching junk TV, limbs entwined. They would take walks to the shore, hand in hand. Now they sat in separate armchairs and rarely went out together. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d even kissed beyond a perfunctory goodbye peck on the cheek.
Milly had died fourteen months ago. She’d been stillborn, Laurie having to endure an induced labor with the knowledge that her baby had died. She’d experienced so many horrors in her working life, but nothing had prepared her for that. And although David had tried as hard as he could to be supportive, something had cracked inside him.
Not that she’d remained the strong one. She’d joined the abyss David entered that day and she still wasn’t clear of it. Neither of them had been great at talking about it. Although David had suggested counseling a number of times, Laurie would have preferred it if he’d ranted and raved. He had every right to feel the world was against him. His father had murdered his mother and now his little baby had died before she’d taken her first breath. It was the insular behavior she found hardest to deal with, mainly because it so much mirrored her own. David carried Milly’s death like an invisible burden within him, as if it was his and his alone. She didn’t begrudge him his grief, but she couldn’t help resent his refusal to share it with her. Last night’s argument wasn’t the first and Laurie feared the same result every time she opened her mouth.
A group of young men drinking from brown paper bags appraised her as she ran up the beach toward the promenade. Laurie came close to stopping, to ask the sneering idiots what they thought gave them the right to look at her that way, but her legs kept pumping.
She should have felt good about her appearance. Every ounce of baby fat had disappeared and her body was a hard slab of muscle, but still she hated her reflection. Even now, David always made her feel good about herself and wouldn’t accept her negative self-appraisal, but she couldn’t see what he saw. Whereas he claimed to see perfection, she saw the same short, stocky schoolgirl she’d seen throughout her teenage years, only now with added bulges of muscle that made her feel even less feminine. She worried that her body’s new shape was a factor in David’s lack of interest in her.
Reaching the east jetty, she turned for home. The wind had picked up and whistled through her ears as she upped her pace for the final stretch. She loved these moments, her heart racing as her body began to fatigue. She wondered how long she could keep going at this pace before her heart snapped, and although she was so breathless she couldn’t speak, she pulled up outside her apartment block with a smile on her face.
In the apartment, David was on his laptop, a fresh coffee on the table in front of him. “Good run?” he asked.
Laurie nodded, still breathless.
“Grab a shower and I’ll fix you some lunch,” said David.
She appreciated the gesture and although it was his subtle way of apologizing, it was also his way of ending the discussion. If Laurie brought up the argument, she would be the bad guy. “I’m not hungry,” she said, heading toward the bathroom.
She heard the front door shut as she was drying. She hated prolonging the quarrel, but she couldn’t let him off this time. How long did he think they could go on like this?
Some day off, she thought, as she prepared herself a sandwich. Sitting on the chair vacated by her husband, she tried to recall a time she’d felt less lonely and came up blank. She would have preferred to have been at work at that moment and was already looking forward to going back tomorrow.