People were idiots. People were heroes – she had friends working in Intensive Care Units right now, facing far more than the occasional head-on cough – but people were idiots. She had learned, when her mother was missing, that it was possible to simultaneously hold antithetical beliefs. She had existed in the centre of a Venn diagram. She loved her father. She loved her mother. If her father had been responsible for her mother’s death, she would have stood by him. She knew she was the only one of her siblings who had stared directly at the solar eclipse of this possibility. Troy thought he had faced it but he had only done so by pretending that he didn’t love their father.
It was not that Brooke loved her father more, or that she loved her mother less. The body could find balance between opposing forces. The mind could do the same.
She could see her decade with Grant as a failure, or she could see it as a success. It was a relatively short marriage that was now ending in a mildly acrimonious divorce. It was also a long-term relationship with many happy memories that ended exactly when it should have ended.
She sniffed. What was the smell? It was so familiar. So obvious. And yet obviously not obvious, because she couldn’t put a name to it. She studied the label on the bottle. It was the same brand she always used, but overlaid with the comforting antiseptic smell was something else: like baking.
Was it the café next door? They were only doing takeaway coffees now. No table service. It was sad to see the tables and chairs piled up on top of each other gathering dust in the corner and the red masking-tape crosses on the floor to keep everyone apart.
‘Hey, did you guys ever find your mother?’ one of the young waitresses asked Brooke just this morning as she handed over her coffee.
‘We did,’ said Brooke. ‘She’s fine. She’s good. Great, in fact.’
There had only been a small paragraph in the newspaper about Joy’s return. There was a touch of chagrin in the tone of the reporting. People didn’t want the old lady to be dead, but it was kind of disappointing that she was alive.
‘Oh, I’m so happy to hear that!’ The waitress’s eyes sparkled above her mask, entirely disproving Brooke’s theory. ‘It’s so great to hear some good news for a change. Stay safe!’
‘Thank you,’ said Brooke. People were awful. People were wonderful. ‘You stay safe too.’
Brooke was a self-employed single woman living through a pandemic. She couldn’t date. She couldn’t play basketball. She couldn’t go out to dinner with friends. Instead there were drinks over Zoom and sudden, intense, beautiful moments of human connection like this （although also awkward: were they going to say ‘Stay safe!’ to each other every single day now?）。
No, she was not imagining that smell. It was from childhood. Like cut grass. It was normally accompanied by cigarette smoke and Chanel N°5.
She put down her spray and walked out to the reception area like she was in a dream, and there it was, sitting on top of her desk.
An apple crumble. Still warm from the oven. Like it had come from another dimension. From heaven or hell or the past. It was wrapped tightly in aluminium foil. There was a sheet of handwritten paper sticky-taped to the foil. The writing was neat and childlike. There was no heading. It began: Four medium apples, peeled, cored and diced.
She opened the door of her office to look outside but saw no-one except for a masked elderly lady pushing a shopping trolley and frowning ferociously in Brooke’s direction, as if daring her to approach.
Brooke went back inside. She peeled back the foil and breathed in deeply. She didn’t need to taste a single mouthful to know that Savannah had cracked the recipe.
chapter seventy
It was a cold blue sunlit August morning. Hard to imagine a deadly virus in this crystal-clear air.
Stan Delaney diligently went through the stretching routine prescribed by his daughter to protect his crappy knees before he went on the court. He and his wife were going to have a hit. Just a gentle hit.
‘You two have never had a gentle hit in your lives,’ Brooke said.
Joy was next to him doing her own Brooke-prescribed routine when his mobile phone rang.
‘For heaven’s sake.’ Joy rolled her eyes. She complained that he was too attached to his phone. He had it in his pocket all the time and placed it right next to his plate when they ate. She said that was poor etiquette. He thought that was the point of the damned thing.
Stan peered at the screen. ‘It’s Logan.’
‘Quick, quick, answer it, then!’ Joy would never let a call from one of their children go unanswered, especially not now, after everything that had happened. They might laugh over it one day, but their laughs would always be tinged with horror.