‘Welcome home!’ Jenni shouted, as she opened her front door.
In all the years I’d been flying across the Atlantic I still hadn’t mastered jet lag. The bursting pressure in my chest as I emerged into blinding sunshine and cement-like heat, the zigzags skirting my vision as I sat in a taxi on the 110. The first time I’d flown out here, in 1997, I’d been convinced for the first two days that I was very seriously unwell.
‘I’ve missed you, Sarah Mackey.’ Jenni pulled me into a brisk hug. She smelled of baking.
‘Oh, Jenni, I missed you too. Hello, Frap,’ I said, stroking Jenni’s dog with a tired foot. Frap – short for Frappuccino, one of Jenni’s vices – tried to cock his leg on me, like he always did, but I jumped sideways just in time.
‘Oh, Frappy,’ Jenni sighed. ‘Why are you so determined to urinate on Sarah?’
I leaned forward and clasped her elbows. ‘Well?’
She couldn’t quite meet my eye.
‘The pregnancy test? Wasn’t it today?’
‘No, tomorrow.’ She turned away. ‘I’m super-nervous, so the less said about that, the better. Come in, get yourself on that couch.’
I stepped into a haven of cooled, chocolate-scented air and noticed that Jenni had bought another piece of artwork. This one was an abstract silhouette of a pregnant woman made up of thousands of tiny fingerprints. A coach she’d been seeing had recommended positive visualizations during the IVF process; this must be part of her response. The picture hung above the easy chair Javier used from 5.15 p.m. until he went to bed at 10.30 p.m. On the counter separating the living room from the kitchen, there was a two-layer chocolate cake, and a bottle of sparkling rosé in a bucket.
I smiled, exhausted and close to tears, as Jenni went into the kitchen and started throwing scoops of ice cream into the blender. ‘Jenni Carmichael, you are very kind and very naughty. We don’t pay you enough to be buying champagne and cakes.’
Jenni shrugged, as if to say, How else would I welcome you home?
She added more ingredients to the blender – few of which resembled food – and switched it on, yelling over the noise. ‘I had Javier go play some pool with his friends, so we could catch up,’ she bellowed. ‘And I couldn’t have you come back here without a sugar binge. It’d be wrong.’
I fell into her enormous couch, with its mallowy spread of cushions, and felt relief so sharp it was almost like a pain. I would be safe here. I would reflect, recalibrate, move on.
Jenni switched off the blender. ‘I went for bubblegum flavour.’
‘Jesus Christ. Really?’
Jenni laughed. ‘I’m not messing around today,’ was all she said.
A good couple of hours later, when we had drunk our thick shakes, eaten several slices of the gigantic cake and binged our way through a large packet of pitta chips, I lay back and belched. Jenni did the same, laughing. ‘I never burped before I met you,’ she admitted.
I poked her foot with mine, too bloated and heavy to move. ‘This has been a magnificent feast. Thank you.’
‘Oh, you’re welcome,’ she smiled, rubbing her tummy. ‘Now, Sarah, I shouldn’t have a drink, but you must try some pink fizz, OK?’
I eyed the bottle and felt a strong, physical sense of dread. ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘Thank you, darling, but I got a bit too drunk with Jo last week and I haven’t been able to face booze since.’
‘Seriously?’ Jenni looked shocked. ‘Not even a little glass?’
But I couldn’t do it. Not even for her.
Then I told her everything. Even the awful bits at the football ground when, at the same moment that I’d been confronted by a stranger’s backside, I had also been confronted with the immutable fact that I had lost my mind. Jenni awwwed and tutted and sighed and even, when I showed her my final message to Eddie, welled up. She did not mock me for any of it. She did not even raise an eyebrow. She just nodded sympathetically, as if my actions had been entirely understandable.
‘You can’t let a shot at love slip through your fingers,’ she said. ‘You were right to try everything.’ She eyed me. ‘You did fall in love with him, didn’t you?’
After a pause I nodded. ‘Although you shouldn’t be able to fall in love after only—’
‘Oh, quit it,’ Jenni said quietly. ‘Of course you can fall in love after a week.’
‘I suppose so.’ I picked at the hem of my top. ‘Anyway, I want to get back to what I know. I want to win that hospice pitch in Fresno; I want to get George Attwood on board in Santa Ana. It’s time to move on.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. There’ll be no further attempts to reach Eddie. In fact, I’m going to remove him from my Facebook friends. Right now, with you as witness.’
‘Oh,’ Jenni said, unenthusiastically. ‘I suppose that’s for the best. But it’s so sad. I thought he was it, Sarah.’
‘Me too.’
‘To have met him on that date, in that place – it was just so perfect. It sent shivers down my spine.’
I said nothing. I’d been trying to forget what Tommy had had to say on this matter. Jenni’s explanation, on the other hand, was more comforting. A big, romantic coincidence; an incredible piece of timing. That worked for me.
I glanced over at her. ‘You OK?’
She sighed, nodded. ‘Just sad for you. And full of hormones.’
I flopped back down next to her as I waited for Facebook to locate Eddie from within my friends list.
My stomach turned over.
‘He’s unfriended me,’ I whispered. I reloaded his profile, in case it told me a different story. It did not. Add friend? it asked.
‘Oh, Sarah,’ Jenni murmured.
The freezing pain returned to my chest, as if it had never gone away. The bottomless longing, a well down which a pebble could fall forever.
‘I . . .’ I swallowed hard. ‘I guess that’s that, then.’
At that moment Frappuccino exploded into life as the front door opened and Javier strode in. ‘Hey, Sarah!’ he said, offering the weird salute he always offered in place of a hug. Javier did physical only with Jenni and cars.
‘Hey, Javier. How are you? Thank you so much for giving us some time alone tonight.’ My body felt droopy and unformed.
‘You’re welcome,’ he told me, mooching off to the kitchen for a beer. Jenni kissed him and passed through to the bathroom.
‘You been looking after my girl?’ he asked. He sat down in his chair and opened the beer.
‘Well, she’s mostly been looking after me,’ I admitted. ‘You know what she’s like. But I’ll be here for her tomorrow, Javi. I can be here all day if she needs me.’
Javier took a long swig of his beer, watching me with guarded eyes. ‘Tomorrow?’
I looked at him. Something wasn’t right. ‘Er . . . yes,’ I said. ‘For the test result?’
Javier put his beer bottle down on the floor, and I knew, suddenly, what he was going to say.
‘The test was today,’ he said shortly. ‘It didn’t work. She’s not pregnant.’
Silence echoed between us.
‘I guess she wanted you to be able to talk about your own . . . ah, problems . . . first,’ he said. ‘You know how she is.’
‘Oh . . . Oh God,’ I whispered. ‘Javi. I’m so sorry. I . . . Oh God, why did I believe her? I knew it was today.’
I glanced at the kitchen door. ‘How’s she been?’
He shrugged, but his face told me all I needed to know. He was lost. Out of his depth. For years, there had remained avenues of hope, and keeping Jenni plugged into them had been Javier’s job. It had shielded him from the lead weight of her fear, given him an active role. Now, there was nothing, and his wife – whom, for all his emotional limitations, he loved with every cell in his body – was in a deep well of grief. He no longer had a role, or any hope to offer.
‘She has not said too much. Silence in the clínica. I don’t think she is letting herself think about it. Not yet, anyhow. I thought she would tell you and then she would cry, let her emotions come, you know? That’s why I went out. Normally when she can’t talk to me, she talks to you.’
‘Oh no. Oh, Javi, I am so sorry.’
He swigged his beer and sank back into his chair, staring out of the window.
I looked over at the door. Still nothing. The clock on their kitchen wall ticked, bomb-like.
Several minutes passed.
‘She went to the bathroom on purpose,’ I said suddenly. ‘To hide. She knew you’d tell me. We should . . . we should go and get her.’ I got up, but Javier was already up. He strode across the kitchen floor, shoulders hunched.
I hovered uselessly in the kitchen as he knocked at the bathroom door. ‘Baby?’ he called. ‘Baby, let me in . . .’
After a pause the door opened and I heard it: the desperate sound of his wife, my loyal friend, who’d postponed her own grief so she could look after mine, gasping for breath as tears and despair erupted savagely from within. ‘I can’t bear it,’ she wept. ‘I can’t bear it. Javi, I don’t know what to do.’
Then the unbearable sound of raw human misery, muffled only by the flimsy cotton of her husband’s shirt.