Autumn had cast a spell around the Dublin streets and the late September sunlight flickered through the sycamore branches and glinted off the car windscreen in white flashes as she drove along. The leafy green shades of summer had been replaced by rich, earthy crimson, mustard and ochre colours as the leaves clung desperately to their branches before a breeze would sweep them away.
She looked at him sitting across from her in the passenger seat of her Renault Scenic. She hadn’t seen him since his wedding day almost three years ago – the day he had told the world that he had finally met ‘the one’. Took him long enough. As he stood up on the altar, beaming with adoration for his new wife, that he had only known for six months, she couldn’t help wonder what had been wrong with her? She had spent so many years wishing he would look at her like that, but he had never felt that way about her.
He looked well now, she had to admit as she risked another look at him. His athletic physique hadn’t changed since she’d last seen him. Marriage obviously suited him, she thought bitterly. His short-sleeved T-shirt showed off his toned forearms, bronzed, she guessed, from all his time spent outdoors. He had never owned a car, preferred cycling everywhere. His wavy brown hair was longer now than it used to be, but it suited him like that. A faint shadow of stubble peppered his strong jaw.
It annoyed her to find that he still made her heart leap. She hadn’t expected that after all this time. Tiny bubbles fizzed up inside her tummy; anticipation or terror, she wasn’t sure which. Was she doing the right thing? She knew he was wondering why she had wanted to meet him again after all this time. She guessed that her message out of the blue last week asking if they could meet somewhere to ‘talk’ had made him uneasy. He had suggested meeting at one of his coffee shops – she had read a feature on him in one of the Sunday papers a few months back and he had a chain of them – quite the entrepreneur by all accounts, but she had suggested Sandymount Strand. They needed to be far away from people who might know them, so she had said she would pick him up from his office and they would go for a walk along the beach.
As soon as he had sat into her car that morning, she could sense that something had changed. The connection – that magnetic force between them that had once been so strong – had somehow dissipated and it made her sad now to find that their conversation was stilted, where it once had flowed. To think he used to be a vein of excitement cutting through the mundanity of her life and now it felt as though they had nothing in common – well, maybe not nothing, she thought, feeling an unpalatable lump of guilt stick in her throat.
They had caught up on their mutual friends, who was doing what, who was married now. She asked him if he had any children and he said he hadn’t. She wasn’t sure if it was her imagination, but she thought she had seen a sheen of pain in his eyes that told her there was more to that story.
‘Mama, why is that man in our car?’ Milly, her three-year-old daughter, who was strapped into her car seat in the back clutching her Peppa Pig lunch bag tightly, asked. She had started playschool a few weeks ago and was so proud of that bag and had even taken it to bed with her the first day they had bought it.
She should have been dropping Milly at playschool that morning but had decided at the last minute to bring her along with her. She had called her teacher and explained that Milly was going to be late, but now she was having second thoughts. Maybe this was a bad idea…
She glanced nervously at her daughter in the rear-view mirror. ‘He’s just an old friend, sweetie.’
‘But me want to go to playschool!’
‘We’ll be going there soon, I promise.’
‘Look, Rowan, can I ask what this is about?’ he was saying. Now that they had got the pleasantries out of the way, he was getting impatient. He wanted to know the reason why she had contacted him again after all this time.
‘There’s something I have to tell you…’ she said, hearing a crack in her voice. That was all she was going to say for now; the car wasn’t the right place to do it, she would wait until they reached the beach, where Milly could play and they could talk without the risk of being overheard.
He was looking out the window now. She indicated and turned right onto the Coast Road.
‘Mama, ook! The candy canes!’ Milly shouted from the back seat, pointing to the red and white striped Poolbeg chimneys that had come into view in the distance.
‘Yes, there they are, sweetie,’ Rowan replied distractedly as she drove.
The sea shimmered silver under the low morning sun and in the distance a container ship was lumbering across Dublin Bay.
‘Me like candy canes,’ Milly continued chatting away.
Rowan’s head was in a spin as she thought about the conversation that lay ahead. She had been over it so many times, what would be the best way to tell him? But the more she thought about it, she didn’t think that there was a ‘best’ way.
‘Mama?’ She heard her daughter say, cutting through her thoughts.
She glanced in the rear-view mirror and she could see Milly’s concerned face. ‘It’s okay, love, we’re nearly there now,’ she soothed.
‘Mama!’ Milly called again, more impatient this time.
‘What’s wrong, Milly?’ She glanced in the rear-view mirror at her daughter once more.
‘Op, Mama! Op!’ Milly was shouting at her now.
‘Jesus Christ, Rowan, look out!’ his voice roared suddenly.
Rowan switched her eyes from the mirror back to the windscreen and suddenly saw what they were trying to tell her. The traffic had stalled, leaving her car impossibly close to the lorry in front of her. Oh God. She slammed the brake and tried to swerve, all the time knowing that it was too late.
‘M-ill-y!’ she heard herself scream as every syllable was stretched out onto the air between them in slow motion.
She was suspended there for a moment, just waiting, bracing herself for the impact. Seconds lasted an eternity until finally the force slammed into her, even worse than she had anticipated. She was shunted forwards against the airbag like a rag doll, feeling the seatbelt slice into her chest like cheese wire before being slammed back into her seat again. Her ears were ringing with the crunch and twist of metal so loud. It seemed to last forever, and she wondered when it might end. Finally the awful roar stopped and there was just deafening silence. The last thing she saw was a blinding flash of silvery light before darkness fell over her and she knew this was it, that it was her time to go.
She didn’t hear the frantic cries of Milly calling, ‘Mama’. She didn’t hear him shouting her name over and over again. She didn't see the people helplessly watching the scene unfold from the footpath, the kind, shocked people who had rushed to assist them and dialled an ambulance. The people who tried to comfort a distressed Milly through the shattered glass, who was still sitting strapped into her car seat. She didn't see the stunned driver that they had crashed into, as he stumbled out from his lorry and realised that one side of the car had gone under his vehicle. He held his head in his hands before collapsing in a trembling mess on the side of the road. She didn’t smell the stench of cloying smoke and burning rubber. Rowan didn’t hear the people who tried to talk to her through the wreckage, begging her to hold on. She didn’t hear the people who prayed over her while she left this world.