In the van, Emily was silent while Noah and Kate argued about the music. Eventually, Noah gave in and let Kate plug her iPhone into the speakers. Emily leaned her head against the window and felt the vibrations of the road run through her, the glass cool against her forehead. Sunshine filtered through the canopy of leaves overhead.
The panic, which had been kept at bay all morning by ensuring she stayed busy and distracted, reared its head again. Joe rushed into her mind. She tried to banish him from a day that was so full of promise, but she felt defenceless against the pull of the tide. Her heart sank; she was so tired of feeling this way.
Her phone was a grenade waiting to explode in her hand; she should have wiped his number and changed hers. She should have stopped herself tracking him on social media and reading about him online, but she was weak. It wasn’t so easy to expunge an ex who had actually managed to achieve fame just as they’d split up. His band, after years of diligence and dull gigs, had finally made it and the music world was going crazy for him; it made him hard to ignore.
Noah drove into the parking lot outside the DIY store. His and Kate’s conversation seemed muffled and removed from her. Emily felt too hot, trapped inside the van. She pushed at the door, feeling a spurt of panic: the hot ache against her eyeballs, the all-too familiar compulsion, her breath quick in her chest. Not again. Not now.
The panic pushed up into her head; her vision blurred and her blood roared. She had to escape, seek the only comfort she could, even though she knew it was wrong.
She got the door open and stumbled out, lurching away from them. She wasn’t sure if she said anything. She thought she told them she’d be back in a minute, but from the matching looks of concern on Noah and Kate’s faces, she wasn’t sure the words made it out coherently before she took off across the car park.
She ran frantically up the steps at the other side, sandals slapping the pavement, and dodged the people meandering along the street. She took herself to the riverbank, to a secluded spot beneath a yew tree where she watched the soothing gush of the rain-heavy river. She looked down at the phone clutched in her hand and wanted to hurl it into the river. She didn’t.
Already sighing with relief, she dialled the familiar number. Anticipation as the staccato tone sounded in her ear, then his voice: deep, resonant, resigned.
‘Joe?’ she whispered.
*
From the beginning Kate had not liked Joe. She didn’t trust his sides: his soulful looks and philosophising one minute, the dirty jokes and laddish laughter the next, how he was always the centre of attention. Ignoring Emily, and then monopolising her, lavishing her with his attention and tempting her away from her friends as the fancy took him.
He dangled Emily like a puppet and Emily, for her part, was all too happy to dance. Kate had tried to tell her this more than once, but to no avail; Emily was unwavering in her conviction – she had never had a boyfriend before. Emily and Joe had met in a bar a couple of weeks after matriculation, and flirted over a pint of lager and a game of pool. Emily had been taught to hustle by Dan; Joe had been impressed and swaggered over to challenge her. University suited Emily; she found like-minded people, didn’t feel like such a freak for her literary obsessions and strong opinions. She had perfected the art of flirtation; she wore tight T-shirts and lots of eyeliner.
‘I just don’t think he wants you for your intellectual capacity,’ Kate grumbled to Emily as they were sitting on the steps by the front door of the Art College, wearing bobble hats and scarves and nursing steaming polystyrene cups of hot chocolate.
It was a few weeks before Christmas break and Emily had been dating Joe for almost two months. Not that it could be called dating, really; there was no formal acknowledgement of each other as boyfriend or girlfriend, but they did seem to hook up at every party, drawn like moths to a flame, and they kissed in dark corners of the student union bar. They had spent an amorous weekend holed up in Joe’s messy, fetid bedroom. But, boyfriend? No. For some time Emily was scared to label him.
‘I don’t think I care to be honest,’ Emily said lightly. She put her head on one side and looked at Kate wonderingly. ‘Can’t you be happy for me?’
Kate set her cup down on the step and squeezed Emily’s knee. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘If you’re happy, I’m happy.’ But this was not true and they both knew it. Emily resented this; for some reason she could not quite fathom, her relationship with Joe did not carry the same weight as Kate’s with Luke. Although Kate was resolutely single by then and would not allow anyone to even try to measure up to Luke.
Emily knew she was insecure and that this made Kate doubt the validity of her feelings; she didn’t trust her to know her own mind. ‘You don’t have to go for the first guy who pays you any attention,’ Kate said. ‘You’re gorgeous, Em, but looks are surface and if that’s all someone loves about you, well the love isn’t authentic.’
Easy for Kate to say. She had become effortlessly beautiful as soon as she shed the grime of the tenement and shook off her tomboyish ways.
Emily spoke quietly, but there was an emphatic undertone to her words that made Kate pay attention. ‘You don’t have the first idea how it feels to have him adore me. It’s amazing. I feel … I don’t really know what love is supposed to feel like, but this is the closest I’ve ever been to knowing. And you don’t know him like I do. He’s wonderful – funny, sweet, passionate. Sometimes I feel sick just waiting for him to arrive at the door, or wondering if I’ll see him when I step into the pub. I never knew love made you feel this way – half nauseous, half delirious, half anxious, all at the same time.’
She was lit up, glowing, believing what she said with every fibre of her being. She had languished in Kate’s shadow too many years, been the plain one, ignored. Joe was hers and it was her time to shine.
‘That’s too many halves,’ Kate pointed out.
Emily laughed. ‘So it is.’ She paused. ‘I meant nauseous and anxious in a good way, you know?’
Kate’s smile was strained. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Of course.’
Joe was Emily’s fate and there was not a damn thing either one of them could do about it.
A lot had happened since then. She’d run off with him, married him, followed him around the country supporting his dream. She’d let him cheat on her and demean her, she’d lost her job and her self-respect. Now Emily didn’t know how else to quell the panic except by hearing his voice.
The problem was that no one had known Joe the way she had. She hadn’t bothered integrating him into her family; her friends hadn’t liked him and she hadn’t tried to make them. Instead, she’d let the bonds of friendship and family loosen, drifted away from them all until she had nothing and no one but Joe.
He wasn’t all bad. He was insecure too. Driven by the desire to make music, to be someone. It was intense between them but it felt so right. So real. She’d stand in damp, basement bars, vibrating with the bass of the music, Joe’s voice soaring above the dingy surroundings, raising the roof of the mediocre little bar, raising his listeners up and taking them one by one to some higher, far-flung place.
With every beat and strum and note, he captivated. Emily would be swallowed up by the dark, drawn in by his song. She would feel his words in her soul. A combined sense of calm and euphoria washing over her, raising the hairs on the back of her neck, tingling all down the length of her spine. Joe, singing the words like every syllable defined him, clasping the microphone, sweat gleaming on his face, his eyes never leaving hers, singing songs he wrote for her alone.
‘I’m not always good at saying how I feel,’ Joe would say. ‘Especially in front of other folk.’ Then he’d pick up his guitar in the dark of his bedroom and pour his heart out.
Kate saw a lazy, arrogant boy with greasy hair and stubble; Emily saw the man he would become. Or might have become, but didn’t.
She had loved him. She hadn’t wanted to give up on him, but in the end she’d had no choice.
*
‘Well,’ Kate remarked, watching Emily fly across the parking lot. ‘What do you suppose that was all about?’
Noah slammed the driver’s door and came round the side of the van. ‘Panic attack,’ he said laconically.
Kate stared at him. ‘What?’
‘She’s been having them for a while. She thinks we don’t know. She always takes off when it happens. She’s sad, depressed or whatever. That’s why everyone is so happy that you’ve come.’
‘I can’t work miracles.’ Kate was starting to feel like everyone’s fairy godmother.
I chose this, she reminded herself; but she hadn’t truly known what she was getting into or how deeply and quickly invested in the Cottons she would become.
Noah’s eyes were trusting. ‘But it’s been awful, and now it’s better.’
Kate sighed. ‘I can see that,’ she said softly. ‘But Emily doesn’t want to talk about what happened with Joe.’
Noah nodded. ‘She turned up on the doorstep out of the blue one day looking like she hadn’t slept or eaten in weeks. She wouldn’t go back for her stuff, even when Dan offered to go with her. She wouldn’t say a word and no one dared mention Joe’s name. She just lay in bed. It was only the fact that Lena needed her that brought her round. Next thing anybody knew she had bought the bookshop. She goes there every day, but she does bugger all. Just sits and reads. She’s bought her own personal library, not a business.’
‘Well, that’s certainly going to change. I might not be able to fix Emily, but I can certainly sort out her business.’
Noah gave her a beseeching look. ‘I hope you can fix her too.’
‘I’ll do what I can, but you need to understand, Noah, that Emily and I haven’t spoken in six years. Things happened.’
Noah folded his arms across his chest. ‘But you can sort it out, right? You wouldn’t be here otherwise.’
‘I’m going to try.’
His shrug was philosophical. ‘That’s good enough.’ He slouched against the side of the van, scraping the toe of his sneakers in the gravel. He sighed expectantly, an opening.
Kate cast an appraising glance at him, inspected the van for grubbiness, then decided she didn’t care and leaned beside him. ‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing … just being seventeen, everything sucks, you know?’
‘Being seventeen is the greatest. You just won’t realise that until it’s too late.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘Gone. The best times. Just like that.’ Though she had meant to sound matter of fact and wise, she was aware of a wistful undertone that belied her intention.
Noah glanced at her with narrow-eyed suspicion. ‘Are you about to tell me I should live in the present and hug trees and stuff? I’m really not into that shit.’
Kate wrinkled her nose and laughed. ‘How can you live anywhere else but the present? I always wonder that. But, appreciating what you have, I guess that’s important. The tree hugging is entirely optional.’ She gave him a confidential smile, dug him lightly in the ribs. He was fascinated by his trainers for a moment and she knew he was thinking about what had happened. Her steady silence worked its magic.
Noah glanced up and began to speak. ‘No one trusts me any more,’ he said. ‘Which is fair, considering I got expelled from school a month before my exams. Emily, she’s the worst. She and Dan are always on my back about something. They’re all at it. Except for Ferg and that’s only because he’s on the other side of the world.’
‘I guess they feel justified. You know they’re just worried, right? Maybe you have to weather it for a bit, let them all have their say. They’ll blow themselves out like any storm.’ Kate could imagine the combined force of the Cottons in all their righteous dismay, desperate to help Noah find a way forward and only succeeding in alienating him in the process. Talking, remonstrating, inveigling themselves into the nitty-gritty of each other’s lives: she had once loved that about them, but she supposed it might also be overwhelming.
He echoed her unspoken sentiment. ‘You know us Cottons; everyone’s business is everyone’s business.’
‘Time to fess up, Noah, what did you do? Seeing how everyone’s business is everyone’s business and I’m practically a Cotton. Plus, I’d rather hear it from you. We were friends once.’ A sort-of friendship between a gawky kid and his almost-sister. In the kitchen this morning Kate had recognised a connection of kindred souls. Even in the jolly maelstrom of brisk Cotton life, she could see that Noah was every bit as lonely as she had once been.
‘You are a Cotton,’ Noah said and kicked at a loose stone. He turned and repositioned his shoulder against the van, wedging his hands beneath his armpits. He was so sweet, so vulnerable, but Kate could see in his eyes that he was fed up of being so, of being the child. When he spoke his voice was flat and emotionless. ‘I went to school one day with a knife,’ he said.
‘A knife?’ Kate couldn’t help it.
He looked at her. ‘Yes.’ Again the curious monotone, unsuitable.
‘Keep talking, Noah,’ Kate said softly, trying to quash the urge to shake him and demand to know what he had been thinking. ‘Because that sentence is not finished.’
‘I didn’t do anything with it. Just had it in my bag.’
‘Why?’
There was another lengthy pause. ‘I was sick of the hassle I was getting from this bunch of guys. They wouldn’t leave me alone. Everywhere I turned, there they were, making comments, shoving me about, trying to piss me off. It had been going on for months – I was going out with one of their ex-girlfriends – and I lost it, grabbed the knife one morning and shoved it in my bag. I don’t know what I was thinking. But I was too much of a pussy even to take it out—’
‘Good!’ Kate exclaimed, but he only raised his eyebrows wryly.
‘Things kicked off again and I punched one of the guys in the face in the lunch room and we got into it, a couple of teachers split us up and hauled me off to the office. They searched my bag. Found the knife. Called the police, called my parents. Expelled me. That’s it.’
Kate could see through the transparent layers of carelessness to the vibrations of that day still rocking him, fissures spreading and cracking, until the gap between the Noah he had been before he put that knife in his bag and the Noah he was afterwards, was a chasm. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, laying a hand on his arm, feeling his tremor. ‘That must have been horrible.’ Noah pressed his lips together, his composure harder to maintain in the face of her kindness. He had anticipated condemnation; her sternness would have been easier to deal with, and more what he was used to. ‘They were bullying you for a long time?’ she probed.
His brow furrowed. She could see the word jarred him. Bullying was for other people, for victims. Not for him. His shoulders hunched. ‘They hated me after I started going out with Charley. I didn’t know she dumped him for me, I swear. And then I got picked for the rugby team and … they just started this campaign. Got everyone against me without anyone even realising they were doing it.’ He shrugged. ‘It was smart. Horrible.’
‘So you bottled it all up and eventually exploded. Hardly surprising. What is surprising is that they expelled you. I mean, if there was clear provocation and it was a first offence—’
He looked at her bleakly. ‘I had a knife, Kate. There’s no going back after that. If it had just been the fight I would have got off with a suspension, but …’ He shook his head. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid.’ With each epithet he slammed his fist against the door, then took a couple of steps away from her, turned – eyes hard, shoulders hunched. ‘They all treat me like I’m broken now, watch me constantly, scared I’m going to snap.’ A bitter laugh. ‘The thing is, it wasn’t even a very good punch. I guess I’m not the punching kind. It looks easy on TV, but … have you ever tried to punch anyone?’ Kate shook her head. Noah smiled weakly. ‘I got expelled for the world’s worst punch. And a moment of complete madness.’ He looked down at her, serious now. ‘I wasn’t going to do anything with that knife. They all think I was, maybe just for a second. Premeditation, the police called it. Said if I’d used it I’d have been looking at attempted murder … They made me see a counsellor … Mum thought I was going mad or something. But I wasn’t going to use it. Never.’
‘I believe you,’ Kate said softly, and hugged him.
‘No one else does.’ He was rigid in her arms. ‘It was a mistake. A stupid mistake. They couldn’t see it.’
‘Trust can be earned back, Noah. Not easily, but it can. You have to be patient. And calm – no more moments of madness. No knives, no punches – however lousy.’
Finally, he relaxed enough to hug her back.
Noah’s confession had drained the energy from them both. They leaned against the van waiting for Emily. ‘Any theories about where your sister went?’ Kate asked.
Noah shrugged ‘I have a theory. But you’re not going to like it.’
‘Go on.’
‘I think she’s calling Joe.’
‘Joe? Why would you think that? It’s over. It is over, isn’t it?’
Noah nodded. ‘I checked her phone,’ he admitted. ‘She was acting really weird, jumping like she’d seen a ghost every time her phone rang.’ He shrugged. ‘And I was pissed at her. So I grabbed her phone when she was in the shower. Her call log is full of him. Outgoing calls only. Not long, sometimes just a few seconds.’
‘He never calls her back?’
Noah shook his head. ‘Should we be worried?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. You know checking her phone is a crappy thing to do, right?’
‘She hacked my email,’ Noah offered as explanation.
Kate gave him her most dubious stare. ‘Emily, who can barely use a word processor hacked your email?’
A small concessionary smile. ‘Well, maybe not hacked. I might have left my email open on my laptop. But she definitely read it. Private stuff, you know? That’s out of order. I was messaging someone and she teased me about it. She needn’t have been so high and mighty when she was running off to make nuisance calls to her ex. I’m surprised he hasn’t changed his number by now.’
‘Noah,’ she said with gentle reproach in her voice. ‘Have a heart. She’s hurting.’
‘Yeah, and don’t we know it.’
After a while of waiting beneath the warm sun, sticky backs pressed against hot metal, Noah and Kate gave up waiting and wandered into the air-conditioned cool of the hardware store. The mood of confession might have deserted Noah, but Kate wasn’t quite finished with him yet and pursued him round the aisles. ‘So,’ she said, keeping pace with his loping glide with the trolley, catching at his elbow to force him to stop. ‘What now? You said Dan and Emily were driving you mad. I guess your parents aren’t breezy about the whole thing either …’
Noah stopped and looked at her, face rippling in an anxious frown. ‘They’re not the only ones,’ he mumbled. ‘And now you want to know my future as well? Like I have to map out the next twenty years and I have to do it right now or I’m a total screw-up.’ His voice rose and she could feel the sharp edge of anger beneath the surface of his fragile calm. He was sick of being defined by that moment.
‘Easy, Noah,’ she murmured. ‘That’s not it at all. I’m talking about mending your relationships with your family, and the next couple of weeks, not twenty years. I want to help ease your way with them. I can do that. I have Emily’s ear … .and Dan’s.’
She must have frowned then, or got the faraway look of old secrets in her eyes, because Noah, with unexpected perspicacity, said, ‘Did you and Dan have some kind of thing going on?’
‘What? No!’ Kate shook her head swiftly for emphasis, an overdone denial. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘No reason. Just a look he gets whenever your name is mentioned.’
Whenever her name was mentioned?
Kate shuddered; she had not been entirely omitted from collective memory after all. ‘We were friends,’ she said swiftly. She changed the subject. ‘So you have a new girlfriend?’ She needed to steer them away from her relationship with Dan: a series of non-events; all those mismatched moments, turning points, their terrible timing, and her worry about what coming back might mean.
Noah hid a shy grin. ‘Ye-ah, maybe.’
Kate saw him through teenage girl eyes: floppy hair, deep blue eyes, soft heart. ‘Tell me more.’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Why? She’s not pregnant is she?’
‘No! It’s nothing like that.’ Noah was shocked that she’d asked, then managed a half-embarrassed leer. ‘We so don’t need to have that conversation. It’s just … I’m not certain she even likes me.’ He was the picture of awkwardness, shifting from one foot to the other, staring at the ground and looking so incredibly young.
She and Luke had been in love at Noah’s age, younger even.
She reached to ruffle his hair. ‘What’s not to like,’ she said, which earned another shy smile. ‘Seriously, Noah, you’re a catch. Tell me about her.’
‘OK, but don’t tell Emily. She’ll only give me a hard time again. Her name’s Becca. She’s smart. Like, scary smart.’ He hesitated. ‘She doesn’t know about … about what happened. I’m kind of scared she won’t want anything to do with me when she finds out. Charley couldn’t dump me fast enough. The whole girls liking bad boys thing is a myth you know.’
‘Girls only like the idea of a bad boy. Which you aren’t. The thing is, honesty is really important in relationships. It would be better just to tell her.’
Noah nodded. ‘I know. I will. So, are we finished with the counselling now?’ He gave her a cheeky grin, certain of his forgiveness.
She laughed. ‘Yes, my work with you is done. For now.’
Noah nudged her gently with his elbow and said, half embarrassed, ‘Missed you, Kate.’
‘Missed you too.’ She gave him another quick hug. It felt natural; he was still the little boy she’d read bedtime stories to and plastered grazed knees.
But he wasn’t; he was hovering on the edge of adulthood with so much to figure out about himself.
‘Mum and Dad want me to keep going to counselling,’ he said, slumping over the trolley. ‘I don’t need some doctor telling me what’s going on in my head. When Kate didn’t respond, he added, ‘Seriously, I’m not violent or anything.’ But she knew that he was questioning it, scared of his own self. He looked away, eyes darkening again. ‘It all got messed up so quickly,’ he said. ‘And I don’t know how it happened. One minute, life was just normal, and then—’
‘Things will be normal again,’ Kate soothed. ‘And you don’t have to know what you want to do with the rest of your life. I don’t know that either. I don’t know past the end of the summer.’ It sounded scary when she put it like that. ‘Just the next few weeks. Emily and I could sure do with your help but your work on the farm has to come first …’
‘No. I’m close to outstaying my welcome with him. Dan and I will end up hating each other if we go on like this much longer. And the baby is coming soon.’
‘Yes, but Dan will need you more than ever then.’
‘I s’pose.’
‘Do you have money?’ Kate asked.
‘I save some of what Dan pays me.’
‘So see out the summer, maybe Christmas even. Then you could travel if you wanted. A couple of years down the line all this will be a distant memory of a stupid thing you did once. And there’ll be plenty more of them, believe me.’
‘I wish you could convince the rest of my family.’
Kate laughed. ‘You’re a Cotton, you’re everyone’s property, you should know that by now. Come on, let’s get this wood sorted out before Em comes back. I really want to make a start on the shop this afternoon.’
The clock was ticking on the bookshop now, and on her summer: this brief interlude to recapture, to remould, to decide … Kate was in a hurry, except she didn’t really know what she was rushing towards.
She looked around, hoping to catch sight of Emily tripping along in her borrowed dress and sandals, sparkling from the ill-gotten pleasure of the phone call. ‘Perhaps I should go look for her,’ she muttered.
Noah steered the cart up against a display and left it there, turning into an aisle where floor-to-ceiling shelves displayed stacks of fragrant wood. He glanced back at her as he paused to examine the merchandise. ‘She’ll be back when she’s ready. How about you, Kate? How come you decided to leave everything behind for the summer? Don’t you have a boyfriend back home?’
The scent of sawn wood was thick and heady, pine and resin mingling with the tang of outdoors. Kate took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She didn’t like the reversal of roles. Noah ran his thumb along the edge of a board and looked up at her, curious. ‘It’s complicated,’ Kate said, echoing his words, her tone discouraging him from probing.
Noah didn’t heed the warning. ‘You moved out there on your own. That must have been cool. Brave. I’d love to travel. What made you pick New York?’
It hadn’t been about being brave, or striking out on her own, or any overwhelming desire to live in New York; it had been nothing more than distancing herself from her mother for good, putting space between them. Becoming someone new – and here she was discovering that she couldn’t, not really.
‘It was just something I did.’ Her tone was clipped. She stared him down until he quailed, confused.
‘I’ll go talk to this guy about the best sort of wood.’ He pointed to where a middle-aged man in a crumpled apron was checking off stock on a clipboard. ‘Em needs to hurry up, we can’t choose without her,’ he added.
‘I doubt she’ll know one sheet of wood from another, or care. But we do need her credit card.’ Kate felt like crossing her fingers, wondering if Emily had enough money left to make this project viable. ‘Right. You check out things here, I’m going to make a start looking at paint, OK?’
When Noah nodded, Kate headed to the paint aisle. Closing her eyes, she projected the image of the finished bookshop in her mind’s eye, then she began to mark colours on the chart: duck egg blue, sage green, claret red, cream. Paint was her domain: all those rich, precise colours combining and contrasting to tell a story. The bookshop was going to be beautiful when it was finished and it would be just what everyone needed.