The Summer Without You (17 page)

Ro’s head bobbed to the words as though she was having an Indian head massage rather than a conversation. She didn’t know exactly what Melodie meant, but she felt so profoundly
relaxed, did it really matter? ‘Has anyone ever told you your voice is really amazing? It’s so . . .’ She searched for the word.

‘Melodic?’

‘Yes, exactly!’ She laughed. The word was perfect.

‘I know.’

‘I mean, how clever were your parents to get your name so spot on?’

‘Actually, they didn’t. They named me Samantha, but everyone called me Melodie by the time I was three. Apparently my voice has an unusually high number of alpha waves, which make it
sound so calming – useful in my job.’

‘Yes, I’ll bet.’

Ro saw a couple of women walk down the boardwalk towards them, rolled mats under their arms. ‘Talking of which . . . I’d better let you go, Melodie. Your clients are arriving. It was
lovely meeting you.’

Melodie turned as the women approached. ‘Namaste,’ she said softly, gesturing for them to go into the studio. She turned back to Ro. ‘Would you like to join us? There would be
no charge, of course, for business neighbours.’

Ro put her hands up immediately. ‘No! No, thank you. I tried yoga for the first time last week. It’s not for me.’

‘May I ask where you went?’

‘The SoulCycle Studio, I think it was called?’

Melodie winced. Actually winced. ‘I wouldn’t have thought bikram would suit you, no. From what I see Ro, you are
Kapha prakriti
.’

It sounded like a type of fruit. Ro wrinkled her nose.

Melodie smiled. ‘
Prakriti
means “body type”. Vinyasa yoga is much more suited to your temperament and body type. I am certain you will feel better after the session than
you do now.’

‘Oh, but I feel fine.’ What did she mean? Hadn’t Ro come across as warm and chatty? Did eating granola on the steps somehow count as binge-eating out here? Were her emotions
really so easy for everyone to see?

‘I’ve seen you looking through the windows during the Guruji chants for the past few days. Join us. We can help you find what you’re looking for.’

Ro cringed. They’d seen her?

‘Just put a note on the door directing your clients to my studio – it’s easy enough for them to come to get you, and the clothes you’re wearing will be OK for now.
They’re loose enough.’ Ro opened her mouth to protest again, but Melodie simply smiled, radiating a quiet certainty. ‘We’ll wait for you.’

Ro watched with a rising sense of panic as Melodie disappeared into the small white clapboarded hut. This is what came of eating in public; hadn’t her mother always told her it was rude?
People would get the wrong idea . . .

She stood on the steps for a moment, looking around the deserted square. The sun was shining straight down on it like the landing lights of a spacecraft, but there was no one around to notice.
Ha! Unicorns could have been surfing on rainbows and it would stay her secret.

Sod it. It was time to face it – no one was coming.

Jogging up the steps into her own studio, she scrawled a note with an arrow on it, pointing to Insala Yoga, five feet away, and Blu-tacked it to the door. A minute later, she was walking into
the yoga studio with a look of trepidation on her face. Last week’s encounter with the weekending Manhattanites had been frankly terrifying, what with their Barbie bodies and designer kit and
hypoxic breathing techniques. But the first thing she noticed here was the light – or rather the lack thereof. In Bobbi’s class, everything was bleached and blond and white – the
walls, the floors, the customers, the candles, the mats, the potted orchids on the table in the corner – and two walls of the class were solid glass, drenching everyone in sunlight and
vitamin D, and making their bodies look golden and honeyed, ready for the pools and tennis courts later. But here, the small windows were veiled with jewel-coloured sari silks that fluttered softly
like tropical flowers below the air-conditioning vents and cast the room in soothing shade.

In Bobbi’s class, perfumed candles the size of drums had competed with sticky Marc Jacobs scents, but in this room, Ro could see a lit oil diffuser and, beside it, a small bottle of lotus
oil. The smell was heavenly – the one she’d been detecting all week – and when she closed her eyes in the cool, quiet, aromatic space, she didn’t feel like she was in
America at all, but across the ocean in Asia – with Matt.

The connection made her relax and smile. She opened her eyes to find Melodie smiling back at her, a knowing look on her face. She nodded and gestured towards the empty mat near to her.

‘Ladies,’ Melodie said in her extraordinary voice, ‘shall we begin?’

Ro sat cross-legged, resting her hands on her knees, and allowed herself a deep sigh. For the first time since arriving here, she felt at home.

Ro was just beginning to think levitation might actually be a physical possibility when she heard the knock. She had slipped slowly down into a black velvet hole and found
happiness there – memories of her and Matt lighting her up from the inside, and she didn’t want to leave. If she couldn’t be with him there, she could be with him here. The scent
of Asia, Melodie’s voice, her incantations – indecipherable but suggestive – had led her into a deep meditation where their love didn’t hurt or need to be numbed – as
it had since he’d left – but felt good again, nourishing. For the first time since Matt had stepped out of her sphere, she didn’t feel the profound shock of being alone.

But the knock . . .

She opened one eye and looked around the room. Without moving her head, she could see Melodie had risen from her mat. Moving her head, she could see she was walking towards the door.

She closed her eye again, relieved
she
didn’t have to move; she wasn’t sure she could, anyway; she actually couldn’t feel her legs at all at this particular moment, as
she cast her mind back to the breath in her body, which she had left hovering somewhere around her pancreas.

Why had she never noticed before how good breathing felt? She inhaled again, imagining the breath in her lungs as a rolling, gathering light, illuminating her from within.

‘Ro?’ Melodie’s voice was by her ear, soft and rich like warmed caramel. ‘Ro?’

Ro dragged open one eye. ‘Uh,’ she grunted, like a teenager being roused for school. ‘Uh?’

‘You’ve got a client. They’re waiting outside for you.’

‘Uh!’ Ro was aware she sounded like a gibbon and really ought to try to articulate some words at least, but her body felt so deeply relaxed, her mind so thoroughly far from here that
she was up and halfway across the room before she was even aware of it. ‘Th-thanks,’ she stammered, rolling towards the door like a drunk, trying to shake off the almost trance-like
state.

She opened the door so that the outside world poured in and she blinked into the bright light and harsh day going on without her. It woke her up. She had a client?

She had a client! They weren’t on the porch. She straightened up and marched noisily along the planks of the boardwalk connecting the run of small studios, running her hands through her
hair and rearranging her shirt, which had become skewed round her body during the cat-cow poses.

She inhaled again – why had it felt so peculiarly good in Melodie’s studio? – and opened the door with a flourish. ‘Hi—’ The smile died on her lips.

The Maniac, aka Long Story, held his hands up in a mollifying gesture. ‘I come in peace.’

‘I don’t care if you come in twenty-two-carat gold. Get out.’

The analogy confused them both – Long Story frowned in bafflement – but she stood her ground, out on the porch.

He took in her refusal to stand in the same room as him. She couldn’t even look at him. ‘Listen, I understand why you don’t want to see me, but that’s actually why
I’m here – I’ve come to apologize. Last week on the beach, my behaviour . . . It was so completely out of character. I-I’ve never . . .’ he stammered.

‘I don’t want to hear it. Just get out of my studio.’ Her aura of deep calm had been shattered in an instant. The feeling of Matt was gone – because of
him
?

Long Story hesitated. ‘I know what I did humiliated you.’

The memory of it brought bitter tears to Ro’s eyes, but she’d be damned if she’d give him that as well. ‘Not really. You were the one who showed yourself up,’ she
said quietly, her voice sounding calm, dignified even. ‘Especially in front of your children.’

Her words hit their mark and she saw him wince. He blew out his breath slowly, staring down at the floor and clearly wondering what to say next.

‘Please just go. I don’t need your apologies. I would just like never to see you again.’ She waved her arm before her, indicating for him to take a hike out on the
boardwalk.

‘I’m afraid it’s not that easy—’

She froze. Oh God. He really was a maniac. He was stalking her.

‘You see, I’d like to hire you – I mean
commission
you! I’d like to commission you. As a photographer. For my children.’ He raked a hand through his hair
nervously and her eyes automatically tracked the movement in bewilderment.

Ro stared at him for a long time, not sure whether to laugh, to cry, to call 911. ‘So let me just get this straight: when I met you, you assaulted me for taking pictures of your
children.’

He looked taken aback. ‘It wasn’t assau—’

‘It was assault!’ Ro exclaimed angrily, shouting him down so that he fell silent. She took a deep breath. ‘And now you’re saying you want to pay me to take pictures of
your children. Is that what you’re saying?’

He stared at her for a long moment, his mouth flattening into a tense line. ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘Will you do it?’

Ro laughed at the absurdity of the situation. ‘Of course I bloody well won’t! Do you think I’m completely bloody nuts? You are quite literally the last person I ever want to
see
again, much less work with!’

There it was – all her rage from the beach thrown back at him, her hands balled into furious fists, her breath coming fast and shallow. How did he have the nerve – the nerve! –
to stand in her studio and commission her after his earlier stunt?

‘I see.’ He inhaled sharply, his eyes taking in the pictures all around them, other people’s memories held up as totems of happiness and love and lives fulfilled, his hands
stuffed into his pockets so that his shoulders were hunched. ‘I’m sorry that I made you feel . . .’ he said, his eyes on the floor. Ro thought he seemed exhausted by the
confrontation, out of words, and as his eyes met hers, she could almost believe he really was. Almost. ‘I’m truly very sorry.’

She watched him walk away, past the yoga studio towards the highway, his car keys bunched in one hand, his head bowed.

Melodie’s head popped through the doorway. ‘Is everything OK? I heard raised voices.’

Ro looked up at her. Where did she begin? ‘It’s fine.’

‘You look really upset. I’m so sorry, Ro. He seemed so polite at the door.’

Ro tried to smile, to brush it off, but her face contorted with the mixture of shame and anger she felt in his presence. He had seemingly come in peace, but she felt as thrown by his apology as
she had his aggression at their first encounter. She shook her head and put it down to still emerging from the meditation. She had succumbed to it too deeply – finding Matt there – and
now felt like she did when she slept too long in the day and woke too suddenly – heart pounding, dizziness, vague bewilderment as to what the time was, where she was and why.

Always why. Because even when she was fully awake, the answer to that last question eluded her. Why was she over here when Matt was over there? Why hadn’t he talked to her before booking
his flights? Why . . . why hadn’t she been enough?

Ro was in the shower when Bobbi turned up that Friday evening – she could actually feel the change in the house even under running water, as though the walls were
vibrating with the extra charge – and she felt a flutter of excitement at the thought of seeing her sophisticated housemate again. It had been a long week – no other customers had
looked in to the studio after Wednesday’s unwelcome visit, no more contact from Matt – and she was eager to hear about someone else’s news apart from hers and Hump’s.

It wasn’t to say Hump wasn’t great. He was. With Greg and Bobbi back in Manhattan during the week, the downshift in energy in the house was welcome, and she and Hump had fallen into
an easy rhythm together of quiet mornings where they didn’t disturb each other (Hump was usually out first, kayaking on Georgica Pond) and hooking up at the studio at lunch after she’d
finished Melodie’s mid-morning class. Hump would bring her a coffee and a flagel, having handed over his shift to one of his team of drivers, and would spend some time at his computer,
dealing with advertisers, printers and mechanics as she drifted around the studio, playing
Angry Birds
on her phone and watering the hydrangea. In the evenings, once Ro had come in from her
nightly bike ride – provided Hump wasn’t ‘entertaining’ a particularly pretty blonde/brunette/redhead he’d met on one of the Humper runs – they’d sit on
the porch together, Ro rolling a bottle of Bud in her hands and taking ever bigger sips as she slowly began to acquire a taste for beer.

Ro loved how easy she felt in Hump’s company. They had been living together for precisely eight days now and already they didn’t feel the need to fill silences or talk incessantly,
bringing each other up to date on their long and winding life journeys to this point.

Bobbi, on the other hand, had somehow managed to dominate the house even all the way from Manhattan, texting Hump the names of interior designers he hadn’t asked for and filling the
freezer with her special diet boxes of food, which were scheduled to be delivered to Sea Spray Cottage every other weekend. (No one had heard from Greg, of course. It seemed that when he was in
Manhattan, he went underground, just working round the clock.)

Ro wrapped herself in a towel and stuck her head out through the bathroom door just as Bobbi ran up the stairs, two at a time. ‘Bobbi? I didn’t think you were coming out this
weekend.’