Page 5 of The Shape of Your Heart
In spite of his attempt to reassure me, I have a feeling of foreboding I can’t shake. I try to tell myself I’m jumping to the wildest of conclusions; that nothing has happened, that Liam’s car had a flat tyre. But when we reach the church, seeing my mum and my sisters walk towards the car, taking in their tear-stained faces, I feel my heart twist, before it stops for one heart-breaking moment. As it restarts, I realise that Liam isn’t coming today or any other day; just like that, everything’s changed.
* * *
I don’t remember anyone helping me out of my dress and into my pyjamas. Lying in my bedroom, the shock is too great for me to think about anything other than one fact:I found my once-in-a-lifetime love, but now I’ve lost him.
As I replay my mother’s words, it feels like I’ve been savagely uprooted from the life I loved and plunged into a hideous nightmare.There was an accident… A witness said a car came out of nowhere. Max didn’t have time to react…
At some point I’m dimly aware of Sasha coming in. Lying next to me, she strokes my hair then rests an arm over me. A little while later, Alice comes in. Crouching on the floor beside me, she takes one of my hands.
As Sasha’s arm around me tightens, I conjure Liam’s dear face, the eyes that were filled with kindness, and remember the feel of his thick dark hair, his body against mine – the body I’ll never touch again. My mind fills with horrific images as I imagine the crash, the impact that took Liam’s life away; a life we were meant to share.
It feels as though the world has closed in around me, as a torrent of thoughts fills my head. I don’t have any idea how I will get through this. If it was going to end like this, what was the point of Liam and me meeting? But having known him and loved him, without him in my life, I can no longer see the point in anything.
3
Time heals, people have been all too keen to tell me. Leaving out thesometimes. And a year later, I cry less, I can say Liam’s name out loud, but I am no closer to moving on.
Unable to afford the house we were going to buy, I’m still living in the cottage we rented together, huddling within walls that are comfortably familiar, where every corner echoes with memories of us. Meanwhile, the garden has become my haven – I know every pebble, every plant, the walled corner where tiny ferns have taken root, their fronds softening the grey of the Cornish stone.
After weeks off work, I went back part-time, but it’s as if I’m going through the motions. Every few days, my dad comes over. He doesn’t say much, just drinks the tea I make him, pats my shoulder when I cry, then asks me to show him around the garden.
‘This was the first thing Liam bought me.’ I point to the jasmine that clambers up a sheltered wall. It came from a garden in the grounds of an old house that was being done up into modern apartments, the kind I detest. I must have told him the story a dozen times or more, but my dad lets me talk, nodding silently.
When Mum comes over, she talks about anything but me and Liam: like someone she’s met at bridge club or the gardener letting her down. The nearest she gets to anything of meaning is when she says, ‘You are OK, aren’t you?’
‘Of course I am.’ I blink away tears, knowing she doesn’t want to hear the truth, that my cracked open heart will never get over this.
In all this, my sisters endeavour to rearrange their lives around me, taking turns to spend their weekends with me.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ I protest – albeit half-heartedly, when Rita and Sasha turn up together.
‘You really should stop saying that,’ Sasha says gently. ‘We’re here because we want to be, Cal. This is what sisters do for each other.’
* * *
In this weird, disjointed life I find myself in, some days I make it to the beach, where I spell Liam’s name a hundred ways: scored into the sand with one of my fingers, delicately painted with coloured sea glass; moulded out of pieces of slate, or in thick ribbons of seaweed draped to form the letters; when I run out of ideas, whispering it into the wind.
Now and then, I visit the site where Liam died, torturing myself as I imagine the accident; leaving a posy of flowers picked from the garden. Other days I go to the church, where instead of being married, days later his coffin was buried. Sitting on the grass, I hold silent conversations with him, trying to curb my frustration when he doesn’t reply, instead crying tears of grief into the grass growing up over his grave.
The truth is, I don’t understand. When love is supposed to connect people across universes, between this world and the next, given how powerful ours was, surely I should be able to hear him.
But after a year of hoping, of hearing nothing, there’s only one conclusion I can come to. No matter the belief I’ve held on to that there’s something else beyond this life, I see it as proof that there is a finality in death. It’s the end. The closing of a door. There is no afterlife, no ethereal connection between us.
It’s a realisation that’s devastating, leaving me at my lowest ebb, forcing me to face the reality I’ve lost Liam for ever. Holed up at home, I cry for days on end, before pain-racked, exhausted, I think about ending it.
Going to the bathroom, I stare at my face in the mirror for a moment. It’s like looking at the ghost of who I used to be, at someone for whom life is over.
Right on cue, my mobile buzzes. Picking it up, I feel a jolt as I gaze at Alice’s face, before thinking of all my sisters, then my parents. However broken I feel, however wretched life seems, since Liam died, they’ve been unceasingly there for me. Warmth creeps into my frozen heart, and with it comes a realisation. Things may feel a lifetime away from how I imagined they would be, but life isn’t perfect. It can be messy and heart-breaking. But in spite of the pain, I still have so much to be grateful for.
* * *
The days are still too long, the nights longer. In the emptiness of my world, nothing’s changed. The passing of time has slowed, one in which I’ve learned to study a rose for hours – taking in the delicacy of the petals, the intoxicating scent. I can describe each inch of this garden – the tiny violets that have colonised between the bricks outside the door, the succulents that thrive in the sun. The rosemary, sage and thyme that have flourished against the back of the house, the apple mint that’s spread into the lawn so that when I mow the grass the air is perfumed with its sweetness.
Typically one of my sisters calls me every day, but one evening it turns into a video call with all of them.
‘We’re coming to see you at the weekend.’
‘No.’ Gazing at their smiling faces, I feel myself panic. One I can cope with; at a pinch, two. But all of them… Shaking my head, I know why they’re doing this. On Sunday, it’s exactly a year to the day Liam died. ‘I think this weekend I’m better off alone.’
