The Summer Without You (55 page)

Matt laughed again. ‘Yeah, I know!’

The screen flickered between them. ‘Hey, the connection’s not too hot. You wanna speak to Ro? She’s right h—’ Hump stalled, looking around the empty studio.
‘Oh shit, yeah,’ he said slowly, turning back to the screen. ‘She ran out the door just before you rang. Doing another shoot.’

‘Oh. Right . . . So it sounds like work’s taken off for her there.’

‘Oh, man, yeah.’ Hump nodded. ‘She’s, like . . . swamped.’

‘Well, would you tell her I called?’

‘Sure! Course I will.’

‘Great. Well, listen . . .’ Matt’s voice sounded strained. ‘Good to meet you, Hump.’

‘Yeah, you too, buddy.’

‘And, uh . . . thanks for looking after her for me.’

‘Hey, it’s easy to, man. We all love her.’

‘See ya.’

Hump nodded, smiling inanely until the screen went black, then throwing himself out along the counter and looking down on the other side.

Ro was curled up in a ball on the floor, sobbing.

‘Hey, hey, baby, what’s wrong?’ Hump hushed, jumping down beside her, his arm pulling her into him.

‘You were r-right – about everything,’ she hiccupped. ‘I-I’ve messed up, Hump. Really, really badly.’

His eyes tracked her face slowly, concern written all over his. ‘Ted, right?’

She nodded, grateful he hadn’t called him Long Story – even though it was. The longest.

‘You really didn’t see it coming, huh?’

She blinked up at him, hiccupping wildly, her brown eyes splashy and wide. ‘What am I going to do?’

‘It seems to me the doing is already done. Looks like now you’ve got a decision to make.’

‘But how can I possibly choose? I mean, Matt was the only man I’d ever been with. I hardly remember a time when I wasn’t with him. It never crossed my mind he wouldn’t be
the one I’d grow old with.’

‘Life throws curve balls all the time, Ro, and it’s pitched a corker straight at you. You need to look at who you are now – not who you were when you met him. You’ve got
to be honest with yourself – is Matt still what you need? Do you make each other happy?’

‘Yes! I mean, I . . . I thought we did! I thought we had everything until this . . . this fucking
pause
happened.’ She gripped her fingers in her hair, her face scrunched up
with pain. ‘Oh God! We’re supposed to be getting engaged within the month. How could I have done this? How could I have endangered everything I know for one . . . one . . .’ Her
voice trailed off, the sobs stopping in her throat. Because it hadn’t been just one night, any night. Even if it had all been lies and she never saw him again, it had been the night that
changed her life. And it had been worth risking everything.

Hump gave her a squeeze as he felt her fall still, truth gradually dawning like a sunrise.

She dropped her head slowly on his shoulder. ‘I don’t understand how you . . .
you
can be so wise. I must be mad to listen to you. It’s like getting knitting advice from
Bobbi.’

‘Huh?’ He looked baffled by her usual confused analogy.

‘Oh, you know what I mean! You’re such a dreadful tart, Hump. I mean, really, what do you know about committing to a relationship and the sacrifices you have to make?’

‘More than you might think,’ he said quietly, pulling his knees up and resting his arms on them.

‘Hump, I’m sorry – that was a shitty thing to say.’ She pulled away to look at him. ‘I didn’t mean—’

‘Hey, yeah. I know, I know – you said it with love.’

They both managed a smile, one of the mantras of the summer.

‘We’ve all been living with Bobbi too long,’ she mumbled.

He jogged her body with his and they sat together in silence, both lost in their own heads, something beginning to swirl around in hers, a red petal in white confetti drawing the mind’s
eye.

‘Hump,’ she said after a while, her voice quiet and thoughtful.

‘Mmm?’

‘You said “curve balls”.’

He looked down at her. ‘What about ’em?’

She stared back at him, thinking of his enormous capacity to love and heal others. It didn’t make sense, his behaviour – not just the jacking in of medicine but the carousel of women
in and out of his bed. He
liked
women; he didn’t treat them badly or break their hearts. ‘What was your curve ball?’

He blinked and she saw a flash of it then, the sorrow streaking across his eyes like a firework in the November sky, leaving nothing but a sense of the splendour and beauty that had existed
there for a few short moments. She shifted position to get a better look at him. She saw the denial rise in his features, but she shook her head, stopping it right there.

‘Greg and I were talking about you quitting medicine and he said to me, “You never can tell how people are going to react to a curve ball like that.” What’s
“that”, Hump?’

Hump looked away, his jaw pushed forward like a brake, stopping him from pitching forward. He didn’t say anything for the longest time. And when he did . . .

‘My wife dying.’

Air rushed out of the room, stripping everything of pigment and tone, substance and weight, as she watched his head drop and his face collapse, the words making the fact true all over again.

Ro didn’t try to speak. Silence is the greatest kindness; she knew that herself. How often she’d longed for silence instead of sympathy in the weeks after her parents’ deaths,
willing the kind-hearted to let compassion suffice. His were the words that mattered and her silence drew them to her.

‘Her name was Mei, and I knew she was supposed to be mine the second I laid eyes on her. She was teeny, half my size and –’ he rubbed his thumb over the pads of his fingers
‘– like velvet, her skin.’

Ro watched a fleck of dust whirling in a sunbeam past the doorway, gravity pulling it down before a thermal current tossed it high again.

‘We met at med school. She was the high flyer in the year, the one to beat, but I just knew she was the one to catch. God knows how I did it. I don’t know what made her notice me,
but we got married at the end of our first-year rotations.’ He stared at the knuckles of his hands. ‘Everyone said we were too young, of course. Her family was freaking, but we just
knew. It was no biggie. We knew.’

He was quiet for a long time again and she took his hand and clasped it in hers, warming it as he spoke.

‘And then, one day, she got this bite on the back of her hip. She didn’t notice when it happened, but she just kept rubbing it, and by the time she showed it to me, it was bad.
She’d had an anaphylactic reaction to a spider bite. It was nasty but not . . . not dangerous. She was prescribed antibiotics, antihistamines and anti-inflammatories to deal with it. The
usual.’

He rested his head in one palm, taking a breather.

‘Thing was, we’d got married just before our exams. We’d been pretty stressed and hadn’t taken a honeymoon, so we decided to go away for a long weekend and do it then.
She was taking the contraceptive pill, but . . . you probably know that antibiotics can reduce its efficacy, right? I mean, everyone knows that.’

Ro nodded mutely, hoping this story wasn’t going where she thought it was.

His voice had become flat and strained. He shrugged at the bald truth of it. ‘She was worried about getting pregnant, so she stopped taking the antibiotics. There were three days left of a
seven-day course, but she figured it had cleared up. It was only a spider bite.’

‘And she didn’t tell you she’d stopped the course?’

Hump shook his head. ‘First I knew of it was when she got a fever on the Sunday evening. She collapsed an hour later, went into a coma the next morning. And just never woke up.’ The
last words were a rasp, only the husk of his voice left like an emptied honeycomb.

‘Oh, Hump,’ Ro whispered, her arm over his shoulder and holding him close.

‘And the simple fact is, it wouldn’t have happened if I’d just checked. That was all I had to do – check the bottle, check her hip.’

‘Hump, it wasn’t your fault. She was a doctor too. She knew the risks. She wouldn’t have wanted you to give up medicine because of it.’

He shook his head slowly, batting away her absolution. ‘Her death was absolutely preventable. A hundred per cent. She shouldn’t have died – it’s a travesty.’ He
almost spat out the words. ‘Doctors hold beating hearts in the palms of their hands every day, but someone can still die from a spider bite?’ His hand clenched into a fist in front of
him, his arms stretched out over his bent knees. ‘She was dying in front of me the whole time and I never even knew it.’

Ro remembered his excessive care of her burns a few weeks earlier, how over the top it had seemed at the time. ‘Hump, no,’ she whispered, horrified by the blame he bore. ‘It
was not your fault.’

He looked across at her. ‘You know you remind me of her a bit. Not . . . not to look at. Her hair was darker and straight. But your manner, you know, kind of crazy sense of humour, kooky
laugh.’

Ro had a kooky laugh? ‘Was she always falling over too?’

‘No, but she was always losing things.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Like, all the time. And, for all her cleverness, she could be totally ditzy. One time she bought this magnet thing
that you stuck to the fridge and put your keys on it, so they didn’t get lost.’

‘Yes?’

He shrugged. ‘We had an integrated fridge, so it wasn’t magnetic. She still lost her keys.’

Ro laughed. ‘My kind of girl.’

‘Yeah. Yeah, she was a “once in a lifetime”.’

His head dropped again and Ro squeezed the back of his neck. ‘Hump, you’ll never forget her, obviously you won’t, but one day you will meet someone.’

He shook his head quickly. ‘Uh-uh, not me. I had the real deal. The best I’m going to hope for now is fun. Just fun.’

Ro thought she’d never heard ‘fun’ sound so bad. ‘But you’re seeing someone now, aren’t you? You don’t have to tell me about her, but she must be . . .
different. You’ve not had any hook-ups for weeks.’

Hump glanced at her, deliberating. He took in her puffy eyes and mottled cheeks, the sadness in her own eyes. ‘Agh, it’s a whole load of crazy. Besides, there’s nothing to
say.’ He stared at a knot in the floor. ‘Even if she was different, it can’t go anywhere.’

Still he wouldn’t confide. Ro bit her lip, not wanting to push. ‘I wish you’d told me about Mei sooner.’

‘I thought about it,’ he nodded. ‘Several times. But . . . how do you bring something like that up?’ He shrugged. ‘And anyway, you’ve had your own thing going
on.’

Ro cringed. Compared to his, her problems seemed utterly trivial. In fact, compared to everyone, her problems seemed trivial. A pause? That was
it
? When she thought about what Florence
and Greg and Bobbi had been through. And Hump now. And Ted – him most of all, the children . . .

‘He’s a widower too, Hump,’ she said quietly. ‘Marina died.’

Hump whipped round to face her, shocked.

She blinked back at him, her eyes instantly refilling with tears. ‘It’s the . . . it’s the saddest story I ever heard. And those poor babies . . . I couldn’t ever be
enough.
I
couldn’t match up.’

‘That’s obviously not what Ted thinks. It’s plain as day on his face. I saw it the first time I clocked him watching you.’

‘But . . . all of it . . . it’s . . . it’s another woman’s life,
her
family,
her
husband. I can’t just step into her shoes and pick it up, like a
second-hand dress.’ A fresh sob hiccupped out of her.

‘Yeah, you can. That’s the curve ball right there. It’s not the path you thought you were going to take, but suddenly . . . you’re at the crossroads and you’ve got
to choose.’

‘But what if I don’t want it to be like that? What if I want to do it all fresh with someone who’s learning along the way, like me? I didn’t come out here looking for
this – a grieving husband, a ready-made family. It’s everything I don’t want.’

Hump put his hand on her forearm. ‘I know, baby. But did you ever think that it might just be everything you need?’

Time was playing games with her – rushing through her hands like running water last weekend when she’d wanted it to stop, freeze into ice and become something she
could hold, play with at will. Now it was dragging its feet.

She’d had to leave the studio early, even shaking her head and pretending she was just a part-timer when a couple had come up, enquiring for her, as she’d locked up. She had no
appetite for work. Or food. Even when she remembered to fix a meal, she forgot to chew, her eyes trained on the middle distance, somewhere between here and there, trying to find an answer, find the
will to call.

Now she was sitting on the porch, a beer in her hand, waiting for Hump to come back with Bobbi from the Jitney stop on Main Street – just like he had their first weekend, the day after
she’d arrived, the day after she’d first met Ted.

How much had changed since that day. How much
she
had changed since that day. She had survived for one thing – arriving out here, dressed in Matt’s clothes, a bewilderment
clouding around her like perfume as she tried to navigate her way in this strange new world, feeling like a pilgrim, out on her own now. She’d made new friends, set up her career, established
a strangely healthy lifestyle of walking on the beach, yoga and cycling (with sprinklings of kayaking, tennis and early morning swims thrown in sporadically). She had done all that, one day at a
time. But she’d lost her heart on day one. It had been the very first thing she’d done here, before she’d even unpacked.

The Humper rumbled down the road and Ro inhaled, bracing herself for the assault that always was Bobbi in the house. She smiled as the big yellow nose turned round the hedge and jiggled up the
drive, amazed to see not just Bobbi in the car, but Greg too – Bobbi had bagged the front seat, of course – before remembering he was riding in the showjumping competition this
weekend.

She held up her beer bottle in greeting as they jumped out, reaching inside herself for a smile. Her housemates didn’t need to add her misery to theirs.

‘I am so fricking glad to hear you jumped his bones at long last!’ Bobbi greeted her back, bellowing for good measure as she ran across the small lawn and up the porch steps.
‘It took you long enough. Hump and I noticed it at the freakin’ vineyard. We had a bet goin’.’