Black Dog Summer (34 page)

“But haven't I—”

“It was different. She didn't expect anything of me, doll; she just liked who I was. I know it makes me sound selfish, but I just didn't want to lose that.”

Adele is about to make a snide comment about how it sounds as if Sally was his fix, but she stops herself. She clears her throat. “I know what you mean,” she says instead. “She was my sister, after all.” The summer night seems suddenly too cool. Adele pulls her cardigan tighter and wraps her arms across her chest. “That's just how she was.”

“Ja,” Liam whispers. “Poor old Monkey.” A large moth flutters past his face, so close he can feel the movement of its wings along his cheek.

“Liam, I . . . I understand how it feels,” Adele says at last, “to want Sally in your life.” Liam puts his arm around his wife's shoulder and draws her rigid body close. “And as mad as this sounds, coming from me, I kind of admire you for doing something about it, for not letting her go. I couldn't, not after the things I said to her that day, I was so . . . I wish . . .”

“Don't, doll, don't beat yourself up about it. Sally wouldn't want you to. You know that.”

“I guess . . .”

“She wouldn't, Addy.”

Adele lets her body relax against her husband's chest. The tears that come, this time, taste only of salt.

ADELE WAKES
in the empty dark hour before dawn. Liam is fast asleep, and she counts off his soft snores like the ticks of a clock. Finally, after counting five snore-minutes, she slips out of bed and leaves the bedroom.

The landing carpet is warm beneath her bare feet. She takes one small step, and then another, and then stops at Tyler's bedroom door, tracing her finger over the letters of the Keep Out sign before pushing the door open to peer in.

Her son lies on his belly, just as he did when he was a baby, arms tucked up against his sides and fingers curled into loose fists. The blond bangs he insists on wearing in a greasy curtain over half of his face are tucked back now, and his bare forehead looks vulnerable. Adele finds herself smiling in the dark. Once those pimples clear up he'll look just like Liam.

Then Adele checks in on the girls. They're both lying on their sides, facing each other across the untidy room like sleeping bookends. Bryony's bruises are invisible in the gloom, but the white bandage on Gigi's upper arm glows like a beacon. Adele takes a step further in, but stops when she almost trips over one of Bryony's Rollerblades.

It's a large enough room for two, but with all Bryony's mess, it seems overcrowded. During supper, when Adele had suggested that the family clear out Liam's home office and turn it into a bedroom for Gigi, the girls had looked at one another for a long moment before both shaking their heads in unison: “No.”

Adele leaves the sleeping girls and pauses on the landing before heading to the stairs and trotting down them, across the hallway, and into the lounge.

She switches on the light and goes to the bookshelf, selects a thick, brown-covered photo album from the pile, and tucks it beneath her
arm. She stops for a moment, considering, and then heads to the small antique desk in the corner where she keeps her stationery. In the top drawer, beneath a pile of old birthday cards, some writing paper, and a host of almost-out-of-ink pens, she finds what she is looking for: a small, pewter picture frame, still in its shop wrapping.

She drops to her haunches on the carpet and places the frame on the floor in front of her, and then the photo album beside it. She holds her breath and opens the cover. The first page is full of baby pictures, some in faded color and some in black and white. There's Adele as a toddler with two rickrack ribbons in her hair, and Sally as a baby in the garden with a gummy smile and a trail of soil and spit spilling down her chin.

Adele turns the pages until she finds the picture she is looking for: herself and Sally smiling in the sun on the “last family holiday,” their blond heads touching and their eyes bright.

With great care, she peels back the plastic covering and removes the picture from the page, holding it in one hand while she removes the cellophane from the pewter frame and prizes the back off it with the other. Finally, she places the photograph inside the frame, smooths down the corners, and then slots the back into place.

She closes her eyes and sits with the framed picture folded in her arms and pressed against her chest until the birds begin to sing the morning in.

I HEAR
a new call above the crooning of the wood pigeons and zither of cicadas. It is nothing like the story noise that hounded me before; this one is the opposite of sound, the promise of peace and something indefinable that is so much more than peace. It whispers and hums and beckons me to follow it up and out and away from here.

As I listen to its song, I begin to feel myself dissolving, blurring at the edges. I can go.

Wait.

I root my feet back down into the red soil, feeling the earthworms wriggling at my soles, and search for the story thread that tied me here.

I find Tyler's thread almost at once: it is ammonia sharp and all tangled with hormones and confusion. Then there is Bryony's: purple with new things that cannot be unknown, but still sweet-scented, like a bowl of plums left standing in the sun. Adele's is ivory, lace-delicate in patches, swollen dark with barbs in others. It flows alongside the threads of her children, and knots in with Liam's, whose own story thread is no longer navy blue and salty as it was the day I first discovered it. It is mown-grass green.

I reach out to touch the green thread, but then stop, realizing that I no longer want to wrap it around me. I move back and watch as it flows out, unencumbered, beside the others, towards a place that I cannot see.

My own thread has gone.

However, I find that I am holding loosely on to another. It is red, lightening towards autumn orange as it spools out alongside the others, sometimes weaving in along with them, sometimes loose and alone. Gigi's story thread. I do not let it go.

Cool, like the breath before a storm, the silence that is more than silence beckons me again.

But Gigi's thread is warm in my hand.

For a moment I am stretched tight between them like an overtuned guitar string, and then, quite suddenly, I know that I do not have to choose. This knowledge comes with the rattle of mussel shell against rock and the faint echo of Lesedi's laughter, joyous on the dry air:
I am not just one thing.
I am made up of myriad pieces: both a story that has already been told and a journey waiting to begin.

I am so grateful to Oli Munson for his support and brilliance, and to Laura Palmer for her astonishing faith in me, her patience, and her invaluable editorial insight. Huge thanks, also, to the wonderful team at Head of Zeus.

Many thanks to Peter Caldwell, who took time out of his busy schedule ministering to Africa's threatened wildlife to share a much-needed fragment of his vast veterinary knowledge with me.

A special “cheerleader” thank-you goes out to my loving friends and family, who've been unfailing in their support for so many years (with Joe Vaz, pom-poms a-waving, leading the charge).

Finally, I owe a lifetime's debt of gratitude to Grant for his huge heart, his endless reserves of encouragement and pragmatic wisdom, and for being the gentlest first reader ever. Without him at my side on this journey, I might never have found the courage to begin.

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Miranda Sherry

Originally published in 2014 in Great Britain by Head of Zeus

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First Atria Books hardcover edition February 2015

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