Page 98 of If I Could Say Goodbye
Chapter Sixty-Six
Jennifer
I wait for them all to leave, running my finger along my bottom lip where I can feel Ed’s kiss lingering, the warmth of it, and I know I have made the right decision.
‘Jen! Help me with this, will you?’
Mum’s pink-slippered feet are standing on the rungs of the ladder. ‘I’ve found another box of Kerry’s notebooks.’
I reach up and take the cardboard box from her and carry it downstairs.
‘Cuppa?’ Dad asks as I land the box onto the pine table.
‘Please.’ I rip off the tape as Mum joins me, sneezing from the dust in the attic.
‘I thought this was another box of Christmas decorations. I thought I’d get them down and give them a bit of a clean, it’ll be here before we know it.’
‘It’s only the beginning of autumn, woman,’ Dad says, giving me a wink.
‘Oh, shush. You know I like to have everything clean and tidy ready for Christmas.’
My hands grasp a notebook entitled ‘Kerry Hargreaves 2006 Top Secret – do not open’.
‘It says top secret for a reason, dearest sister.’
‘2006 . . . how old would she have been?’ I ask.
‘Hmmmm,’ Dad thinks. ‘Eleven, twelve?’
‘Yeah . . . I would have been sixteen.’
The first page reads: ‘Things that make Jennifer happy – smile rating 1–5’.
‘How lovely is that?’ Mum says, clutching her heart. I flick through the pages: Giving her my last Rolo (3); Letting her borrow my iPod shuffle (4); Fibbing to Mum about who broke the toilet seat (5). There are pages and pages of entries. The book then splits off into ‘Chapter Two – Things that make Jen jump – scream rating 1–5’.
‘That little sod!’ I say, laughing as I recognise some of the things listed. ‘She put that frog in my school bag!’
Dad brings the tea to the table and scans the page. ‘You did scream, no wonder you scored a five.’ He crunches on a bourbon cream, reaches over and turns the page. ‘Dressing up as a ghost and jumping out of wardrobe (5)’.
Mum clears her throat, trying to ignore the elephant (or in my case the sister) in the room.
‘I remember that, she had your shirt on, Dad, and had covered her face in Mum’s talcum powder.’
‘I don’t remember that.’
‘No, she made me swear not to say anything or she’d tell you that I pretended to be sick and got the day off school because I hadn’t revised for my French exam.’
‘Did you? You little swine.’ But Mum is smiling.
We spend the evening going through the notebooks, laughing at the things she got up to without us knowing. I miss her so much my heart aches, but I don’t look at her once.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Ed
Jen’s coming home. It’s been a month with the new meds and I finally have my wife home. She’s still not properly back to her old self – I still sometimes see the sad look on her face, she still sometimes stares off into space – but it’s different now: she isn’t looking at something in the space . . . the space seems as empty to her as it is for me.
Hailey is pulling Jen’s case on its wheels through the hall and chatting about how she’s a free reader at school. Oscar pulls her hands and drags her into the kitchen, where blue-and-white-striped Greek flags are folded around cocktail sticks and stuck into pieces of pitta bread. He runs to the fridge and pulls out tubs of taramasalata and tzatziki. He has insisted that we prepare a Greek dinner.
