Always, in December by Emily Stone
Chapter Twenty-Four
After a thirty-minute drive from Josie’s grandparents’ place, Helen parked in the car park of the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford and the three of them got out of her car, Josie reliving her teenage years by hopping out of the back seat. She and Helen had both stayed overnight with her grandad in her grandparents’ cottage, Helen insisting that Josie slept in her old room while she took the sofa. Not that any of them had had much sleep, each of them waiting for a call, waiting to be told something worse had happened.
Josie hadn’t cried yet. She felt like she’d been in a constant fight to control the tears from the start of the three-hour journey – a train then tube from Streatham to Marylebone, waiting at the station, a train to Oxford, and then a taxi. Even after she got to the cottage, she hadn’t given in to the urge to cry and the result was that she was fluctuating between a calm stillness and an intense burning behind her eyes.
They arrived at five to nine, all of them having been up since the early hours, filling the morning with small talk until it was late enough to leave the cottage. Now they walked in relative silence, across the car park and through the glass doors of the hospital. She was in the cardiology ward, according to Josie’s grandad, so they followed signs through the hospital and ended up in a small waiting room.
The nurse at the reception desk there smiled, putting on big, round glasses when Helen asked where Cecelia Morgan was. She glanced briefly at something behind the desk. ‘She’s just through the doors to your right, then take the first left and you should see her. I can only let two of you through at a time though,’ she added. ‘Hospital rules, I’m afraid.’ She slipped off those glasses, smiled benignly at them.
‘You two go first,’ said Helen. ‘I need to pop to the loo anyway.’
So Josie followed her grandad through the doors, trying to keep her stride relaxed for his sake. They knew nothing, she reminded herself, and people didn’t always die from a heart attack. Some did, though, a dark voice in the back of her mind said.
Memo was propped up against two cushions on the ward where they found her, the two beds either side of her also occupied. She smiled as Josie and her grandad approached, and though her face looked a little paler, and more lined than usual, her grey bob unnaturally unkempt, she seemed ok at first glance. In all honesty, her grandad looked worse than Memo, dark purple circles under his brown eyes, like he hadn’t slept for days.
Memo held out a hand for her husband, who went to her side immediately, stroking back her hair in a tender gesture of the kind he never usually liked to perform in public. She held the other hand out to Josie, who went to her, making sure to keep her smile in place. Neither of her grandparents needed to see her cry right now.
‘How are you?’ croaked Josie’s grandad.
‘Oh, I’m fine, like I told you,’ Memo said reassuringly. ‘It’s a bit odd, what with all these doctors and nurses prodding about, and they want to keep me here a while to observe, and really this gown does nothing for my complexion, but apart from that . . .’ She smiled at each of them in turn, though Josie felt her own smile falter. Because the thing was, even if she was in a lot of pain, there was no way she would say anything – this was the woman who had once brushed off a broken arm as ‘just a minor inconvenience when you’re trying to do the shopping’.
‘Have they said anything about how long you have to be here? Or what happens next?’ Josie asked, glancing around to take in all the other patients here. It was quite a big room and had that peculiar smell – disinfectant mixed with hidden body odour – and Josie found it strange how a room so bright and white could feel so incredibly claustrophobic.
‘Well, they drew me a diagram this morning, and said something about eighty-five-per-cent blockage, but, really, they just need to run some tests and scans and the like so they can tell us what to do.’ This time when Memo smiled, it seemed a little more strained. Josie caught sight of a nurse across the other side of the room – blonde, with creamy skin, and younger than Josie – bending over one of the patients. She had the strongest urge to go up to her, to tell her, tell someone, that her grandmother wasn’t usually like this – she wasn’t old and sick, she still went for bike rides at the weekends, she baked terrible biscuits and hosted a book club every month, even though she failed to finish the damn book every single time. She was a person, not just an old, sick lady. She took a slow breath, returned her attention to her grandmother, and tried to join in the idle small talk – it was clear that Memo wanted to be distracted, that she didn’t want to go over and over what had happened or what might be about to happen.
After thirty minutes, Josie went to switch with Helen, who jumped to her feet in the little cardiology waiting room, having been staring at a magazine on her lap. ‘She seems ok,’ Josie said before Helen could ask, and Helen let out a slow breath, nodded.
Then Helen looked Josie up and down. ‘You should go back to the cottage,’ she said. Josie shook her head, opened her mouth to protest, but Helen cut her off. ‘Darling, I know there is absolutely no way I’m going to get your grandfather to leave once visiting hours are over, and there’s no point in us all just waiting around here, so you should go home – one of us should, at least. I need to be here with him,’ Helen added, when Josie started to try to say that Helen should go, in that case. Helen gave Josie’s arm a little rub. ‘You’ll only be thirty minutes away, so you can come right back. You can take my car if you like.’
Josie hesitated. Thirty minutes seemed like a long time to her right then, and it felt wrong, leaving them here. But she was reading between the lines and knew Helen wanted the rest of the hour to be with her parents, and, in truth, Josie wanted the chance to break down a little herself, out of sight.
‘Alright,’ she agreed. ‘But I’ll get a taxi so you have the car if you need it, and please call me, the moment you know anything.’
Helen stroked her hair. ‘Of course, darling.’ She gave Josie some cash to cover the fare without even asking, and, given she was currently broke, Josie took it.
When she got out of the taxi at the cottage, for a moment Josie just stopped, her breath steaming out in front of her, and stared at her old home, looking at it properly in daylight. She hadn’t noticed in the dark last night that it looked smaller, somehow, even than when she’d last been here a few years ago. It was a semi-detached cottage, flower pots surrounding the front door, the small front lawn neatly mowed, hanging baskets below the one second-floor window you could see from the front of the house and, she knew, the two at the back. All her grandad’s work – he was the gardener. There was a black gate to the left of the cottage, which led to the back garden – that was the way she used to let herself in after school, on the rare occasion that one of them wasn’t home, because they’d never bothered to lock the back door. They hadn’t used to worry about that sort of thing back then, not out here in their little village.
Her parents had lived on the other side of the village – to get some semblance of independence, Josie supposed, so that they weren’t living on top of her dad’s parents. Close enough, though, that they could access their help when they needed it, and could pop round once a week or so. She imagined that had been the plan, anyway. As a teenager, she used to go and stare at her parents’ old house sometimes on the sly, would take a detour on the way home from school, get off at a different bus stop and just go to look at it, to try and remember what it looked like on the inside, and to get a glimpse at the family who lived there now, their daughter too young for Josie to know. But despite that, it was this cottage that she stood outside now that featured most prominently in her memories of growing up.
She used the spare key – it was always in one of the plant pots, without fail – and let herself inside. She crossed through the living room and saw a photo from her exhibition – the one of Silverknowes Beach with a grey, moody skey, hanging in pride of place on the wall. Memo had bought it, telling her she wanted to be her first customer, and seeing it there almost made Josie break down. She took a breath and carried on walking through the house.
When she reached the kitchen she just stared out at the back garden – bigger than you’d imagine from the front of the house. There had been a swing set there when she was younger. Even before her parents died, her grandparents had put it in for her, but they’d got rid of it when she’d become a teenager and had declared she no longer used it, given it to another family in the village, she thought. Behind her was the kitchen table that they’d all had dinner round and she even had the whisper of memories of her parents being here too, the five of them squeezed round a table built for four.
She set to work on washing up the tea and breakfast crockery from this morning, then closed her eyes very briefly, her hands in the soapy water. A heart attack. The words just wouldn’t go away, even though she’d just seen her, had seen that she’d been awake, and talking. But this wasn’t supposed to happen yet. She couldn’t lose her grandmother – she wasn’t ready. She was supposed to have a handle on her life before that happened, was supposed to be settled with a husband or something, supposed to have her own family to lean on. She wasn’t ready yet to lose the parents who had raised her after her own died – she didn’t know how to go through it again.
There was a knock at the front door and Josie switched off the tap, determinedly swallowing the lump in her throat even though her mouth was dry.
When she opened the door, she just stared, then blinked several times. She thought fleetingly that maybe she’d passed out from emotional exhaustion, that this was some weird dream.
He stared back at her from the doorstep, his gaze flickering over her face, as if trying to gauge her reaction. In the cold sunlight, his eyes looked a crisper, darker green. His face was paler than usual, like it was absorbing some of the cold, and there were pockets of shadows under those eyes. His expression was that carefully neutral one, like it was ready to go either way, depending on what she said to him in that moment. She glanced behind him, to the taxi that was now pulling away from the gravel driveway, then shook her head when she looked back to his face. ‘Max. What are you doing here?’ Because of all the people she might have expected to see, he had not been one of them.
One corner of his mouth crooked up – not really a smile, more an expression of solidarity, of understanding. That damn burning behind her eyes started up again.
‘I spoke to Bia. She thought you might be able to use a friend. But if you don’t want me here, I can go. Just say the word, Josie.’
His eyes sought hers with such tenderness that she had to press her lips together to stop her bottom lip from trembling. And in that moment, despite the fact that she’d told him she never wanted to see him again, despite the fact that he shouldn’t be the one person she wanted to see right now, somehow he was. So when he stepped towards her, a little tentatively, and rested a hand on her arm, she gave in and leaned against him, breathing in the smell of him and allowing his arms to come around her in comfort.