Then and Always (3 page)

The chaotic scramble of flung-back chairs and knocked-over wineglasses could only have taken a second or two, but
in that time I did something really dumb: I turned to look back through the window at the approaching car. It straddled the center line of the road, heading straight toward the bend—and the front of the restaurant—with no sign of slowing down.

That was the moment that Matt lost his grip on my shoulder. Horrified, I turned back from the window, and saw that he and Cathy were already some distance away. I stumbled forward to follow them, but Matt’s chair had been knocked over and was now wedged firmly against the pillar beside me. My exit was blocked.

I pushed at the fallen chair frantically, succeeding only in wedging it further between the edge of the table and the pillar.

“Rachel!” screamed Sarah at the top of her lungs. “Get out of the way!”

I pushed and kicked at the chair with every ounce of strength I had, fear and adrenaline coursing through me, until the sounds of the restaurant diminished and all I could hear was the roar of the blood in my ears.

In desperation I looked up to Matt, who began to move toward me until, unbelievably, Cathy grabbed his arm and held him back.

“No, Matt, no! There’s no time! You’ll be killed.”

I heard
that
all right, and part of my brain, the part that wasn’t focused on trying to not let the rest of me get killed, absorbed what Cathy had just done. If she thought I was going to let that pass, she was very much mistaken.

But then another noise rose from the street behind me: the screech of brakes. I glanced behind me one last time and saw the car was braking, but much too late. The speeding vehicle
grew increasingly larger in the window, so close now that I could make out the terrified face of its young driver, his eyes wide in terror as the inevitable approached.

I never saw him coming. He must have moved at incredible speed to get to me. One moment I was trapped in the tiny space between the fallen chair and the window, and the next two strong arms appeared from across the table and fastened onto my own like a vise.

How he found the strength I never knew, but Jimmy literally hauled me from my trapped position, over the top of the table. I caught the look on his face as he dragged me across the surface, mindless of the scattering bottles and glasses as I plowed through them. His eyes were filled with indescribable fear and the tendons of his neck stood out like cables with the effort he was using to pull me toward him.

I grabbed on to him, trying to help, my feet scrabbling frantically over the cloth to propel me forward. From behind us I heard a loud thump as the car left the road and mounted the pavement.

Jimmy threw me. That’s the only way to describe what he did. One minute I was half across the table and the next I was lifted up and thrown like a rag doll, slithering down to the floor some feet away. But that act of impossible strength and bravery had taken up the last precious milliseconds between the car leaving the road and crashing into the restaurant.

Jimmy was still standing directly in the path of danger when the window exploded behind him.

THE FIRST THING
I felt was the heat. Something heavy pinned my legs, trapping them under a weight of pain that burned like fire. And there seemed to be water everywhere, thick,
salty water running freely down from my forehead, over my cheeks, into my eyes and mouth. I tried to cry out, but no sound came. There was nothing left in my lungs but smoke-filled vapor. Someone was screaming behind me, someone else was crying. I tried to turn my head but I couldn’t see properly with the sticky wetness blocking my vision. Tentatively I raised one hand to my head and attempted to rub my eyes. My hand came away covered in a slick red gauntlet of blood. All around me was a mountain of debris, so thick and dense I couldn’t see beyond it to where the crying and screaming people were. The car—half in, half out of the shattered window—was also blocking my view; it was impossible to see what was left of the mangled vehicle, as the air was thick with a dense fog of smoke from the engine and disintegrated masonry from the front wall. I felt the shroud of glass over and under me and knew I must be lying among the remains of the window.

From behind me I heard voices shouting frantically as masonry and rubble shuddered and shifted and I realized that people were trying to reach us. Us. Not just me;
of course
not just me. Jimmy had been there when the car came through the window. Jimmy, who had left his position of safety and had come back to save me.

Ignoring the way the blood flowed even faster when I turned my head, I managed to lift my neck an inch or two off the glass to look for him. The haze of dust and smoke was still too thick, but I thought I could just make out a shape some feet away to one side. Broken masonry blocks and a long twisted piece of metal were lying at a strangely skewed angle on top of a long white board. As my vision began to clear, I realized that it wasn’t a board at all; it was what was left of our table. And the reason why it wasn’t lying flat against the floor,
but was canted at that strange angle, was that something, or someone, was beneath it.

Mindless of anything else, I flung out my arm, raking it in a desperate arc toward the crushed table and what I knew must be beneath it. At first I felt nothing, and then the very tips of my fingers brushed, just for a moment, against something soft.

“Jimmy!” I croaked hoarsely. “Jimmy, is that you, can you hear me?” No reply. “Jimmy.” I started to cry, the tears cutting small rivulets through the dirt and blood on my face. “Jimmy, oh no, Jimmy. Say something …”

The dust and debris had begun to settle a little and I could just make out what it was I had been able to reach. Jimmy’s forearm protruded at a strange angle from beneath what was left of the table. That was all I could see of him, just his forearm. The arm still looked strong and tanned, as it had a few moments before, when it had somehow found the strength to pull me away from danger. Only now it wasn’t moving. Long before the ambulances reached us, I realized that it would never be moving again.

Five Years Later …

The wedding invitation was propped up on the mantelpiece, almost hidden by a small bundle of bills and fast-food delivery circulars. I suppose I was trying to bury it. Perhaps I’d thought that by not seeing it, I could claim to have accidentally forgotten about it and somehow missed the date. As if that was ever going to happen. Of course I’d replied with an acceptance card when the invitation had arrived a few months earlier, but that had been easy, when the thought of going back to Great Bishopsford had seemed so far ahead in the future that I didn’t need to really think about it. But now, with the date only two days away, as I stood in my tiny flat with an open overnight suitcase before me, I didn’t know why I’d ever felt that I would be strong enough to do this. To go back.

Abandoning my packing for a moment, I retrieved the small embossed card from the mantelpiece.
Mr. and Mrs. Sam Johnson request the pleasure of your company at the marriage of their
daughter Sarah to David
 … I ran my finger lightly over the raised scrolled names and knew then, as I had always known, that I
had
to go; that I couldn’t make some pathetic excuse and not be at the wedding of my best friend just because it was taking place in my old hometown. And was it really the town I was scared of, or the memories that I knew were waiting for me there? Memories I’d schooled myself to bury deep and never allow to surface.

Still clutching the thick cream-colored invitation, I raised my head to look at my reflection in the mirror above the mantelpiece. In my eyes I saw the truth: returning to the town was only half the problem. My greatest fear was how I would cope with seeing everyone all together in one place again for the first time in years. Well, almost everyone. A haunted look fell over my face and that seemed appropriate, for I knew it wasn’t a reunion with the living that was going to be so hard to deal with.

I packed my bag mindlessly, not really concerned about what I took. The trip was only for three days, and then I’d be back in my own flat, able to lose myself once again in the anonymity of a big city. To many, I’m sure, it might sound peculiar but I’d actually come to relish living where “everybody
didn’t
know your name.” The only items I took more care in packing were my outfit for the hen-night dinner and the deep burgundy velvet dress I had bought to wear for the wedding itself. Thank God Sarah had eventually given in and accepted my refusal to be her bridesmaid.

“But you
have
to,” she had pleaded, and for a second it could have been the old school-days Sarah, imploring me to join her in some crackpot scheme or caper she had cooked up. Only this time I had held fast in my refusal. I’d felt bad, of
course. But then, I’d known what she was going to ask me even before the words had left her lips.

It wasn’t often that she visited me in London, even though we kept in touch every few weeks by phone. Her job in the North kept her busy, and of course her boyfriend, Dave—
fiancé
, I mentally corrected—lived there too and quite rightly occupied most of her free time. I’d suspected what was coming when she had invited herself down for the weekend. Saying no hadn’t been as difficult as I’d imagined when I’d had sufficient time to rehearse it.

“Oh, Rachel, please think again,” she had implored, and she’d sounded so crestfallen that I had actually felt myself wavering. “There’s no one else in the world I want as a bridesmaid except you, please say you’ll do it.” And when I’d shaken my head, not quite trusting myself to speak in case she heard the chink of doubt in my resolve, she had inadvertently asked the one question that allowed me to abdicate from the role. “But
why
won’t you say yes?”

And it was then that I’d taken the coward’s way out, answering her question by lifting away from my face the heavy swath of hair I wore in a side parting to reveal the silver forked-lightning scar that ran from my forehead to my cheek. She’d pursed her lips and sighed, and in that moment I knew she had conceded defeat.

“Ah, so she’s pulling the old disfigured-face card again, is she?”

I’d smiled in response. Everyone else I knew pussyfooted around the issue, but Sarah was the only one who had the courage never to dress up her words in anything less transparent than the truth.

“Well, if that’s what it takes to keep me firmly seated in a
back pew and not wearing some frothy pink creation up near the altar, then yes.”

She’d looked at me mulishly for a second, and I thought she was regrouping for another try, but then she appeared to reconsider and backed down, only murmuring in her defeat, “I wouldn’t have
made
you wear pink, you know.”

I’d hugged her then, knowing I’d let her down in a big way and loving her because she had let me do it.

BEFORE CLOSING THE
case, I picked up the small brown bottle of pills on the bedside table, to add them to my toiletry bag. I frowned when I felt the weight of the container, holding the bottle up to try and count the contents by the weak light filtering through the window from the overcast December day. There were fewer there than I’d thought, barely enough to last for the next few days. That couldn’t be right, could it? I checked the date on the front of the prescription label. Ten days old. The headaches had been getting worse but I hadn’t realized I’d gone through that many painkillers so quickly. A cold tremor meandered down my spine. This wasn’t good. And while I could lie to my dad when he asked how I was, and even (stupidly) had tried lying to the doctors when the headaches had first started, I knew that soon I’d have to face up to the truth. This was the warning sign they had told us to be on the alert for all those years ago. This was the reason why every phone call from my dad in the three years we’d lived apart would follow the habitual pattern of “How are you? No headaches or anything?” I’d been happy to report for the first two and a half years that I’d been fine, but for the last six months I’d been lying and saying I was still
fine. Eventually I’d made an appointment to see the specialist I hadn’t had to visit since my early days of recovery from the accident. He’d seemed concerned when I had told him about the headaches and their frequency, which made
me
concerned because I’d actually played down their severity considerably. The pills he’d prescribed were not the answer and he had urged me to make an appointment to go back to hospital for further tests. I’d taken the prescription but not his advice and had put off making the appointment I knew that I could no longer avoid.

All of this I had kept from my dad. He had enough to worry about with his own health problems. He needed this time to try and get well, without concerning himself over me all over again. He’d done far too much of that already. However bleak the outcome of his consultation with his oncologists were, he always would end our calls by saying, “But at least
you
are all right now, thank God.” I didn’t have the courage to take that away from him.

I’d sometimes wonder exactly how many mirrors we must have broken, or how many Gypsies must have cursed us, to account for my family’s unfortunate history. First Mum, then my accident, then Dad’s illness, and now these headaches. Was there some family out there who had been blessed with twenty-odd years of good health and luck? Because we seemed to have been given their share of misfortune as well as our own. And it didn’t matter that Dad said that no one was to blame for his illness, because I knew that he’d only begun smoking again after my accident. It had been his way of coping with the stress. And if he hadn’t been doing that, then he probably wouldn’t be ill now.

So many terrible things were linked to that one awful
night. A blinding twist of pain, worse than my most severe headache, stopped my thoughts from venturing down that forbidden avenue.

I intended to leave first thing in the morning and had looked up the times for the first train from London. I’d booked two days off work, for although everyone wasn’t meeting up until the Thursday evening for Sarah’s hen-night dinner, I hadn’t wanted to arrive late in the day. In reality I knew I would need the time to compose myself for the three-day visit, and I had no way of knowing just how hard that was going to be until I was actually there.