We sat in silence. After a little while, he turned away from me and lay back against the carpet, folding his arms behind his head. I studied his profile, the sureness of his brow line, his straight-edged nose. Then I turned away too. What a time to be so superficial and distractible.
I thought of my mother again. I remembered being six years old and missing the ice cream truck when it came by my house. I had chased after it and just as it disappeared around the bend at the end of my street, I tripped. I started to cry as blood dribbled down my legs. My mother was on the phone to one of her clients at the time and had been watching from the window. She rushed outside and folded me into her arms. I could smell lavender and sunscreen. Don’t cry, sweetheart. We drove to the corner store and filled a basket with every colour popsicle imaginable. At home we packed the freezer until it was overflowing. She smiled at my blue-frozen lips. Now you’ll always have backup, so you don’t have to chase the truck if you miss it.
There – that pain again, sharp and twisting. I gasped, falling back into myself.
‘Are you thinking about her?’ Luca asked.
I didn’t answer.
I heard him shift and caught his outline in my peripheral vision. He was sitting up. ‘They say internalized grief takes longer to heal.’
I opened my mouth and then shut it again. I had nothing to say.
His voice twisted into something soft and sombre. ‘When my father died I didn’t cry for three weeks. It’s not that I wasn’t sad. I was sadder than I ever imagined a human being could be. It felt like something was burrowing inside me, trying to claw its way out. Even gunshot wounds pale in comparison.’ He smiled a little, wryly. ‘But for some reason I couldn’t talk about it, I couldn’t cry about it. It’s like everything was trapped inside me, and the longer it stayed that way the more it felt like it was ripping me up. I kept wondering what was wrong with me, why I couldn’t grieve the way my brothers were. Why I couldn’t just feel it and … let it out.’
‘Why couldn’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think I was too scared to cry. I never knew how much grief felt like fear. I was terrified of my life without my father in it. He was a part of my identity, and when he left it was like he took a chunk of me with him.’
‘The best bit,’ I whispered, feeling a deep thud of empathy.
‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘The best bit.’
‘Do you think he did?’
‘Maybe.’ He jerked his head. We still weren’t looking at each other, but I could see most of his face now. His brow was furrowed. He was lost in another time and place. ‘But at the time I never considered that he had left behind a part of him, too, in me.’
‘His best bit?’
I caught the corner of his smile. ‘I like to think so.’
Slivers of moonlight were peeking through the gap in my curtains, streaking across the carpet. I could see Luca’s hands bathed white beneath it.
I found myself moving closer, straining to see him and wishing he would look at me. ‘Does it get easier?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘They say it gets better but I think the pain becomes bearable not because it’s quieter or lessened, but because you get used to it being there. Life goes on, and you go with it.’
I frowned, rubbing the pain beneath my chest. ‘I can’t imagine I’ll ever get used to this,’ I conceded.
He turned to watch me in the darkness. The moonlight fell across his face, alighting the deep cobalt in his eyes. ‘You’d be surprised at what you’re made of.’
‘I don’t think I will be.’
‘I do.’
My throat was starting to feel wobbly. ‘How do I do it?’
Luca got to his knees so that we were leaning towards each other at eye level. He didn’t touch me, but something inside made me feel like maybe he wanted to. I wanted him to. His hands were hovering close to mine. ‘You embrace the pain, Sophie. Don’t fear it. Let it wash over you. Use it as fuel to spur you on.’
‘I don’t want to think about that night.’
‘You have to, sooner or later.’
‘I should have saved her.’
‘You couldn’t have.’
‘I didn’t try hard enough.’
‘Sophie.’ Luca came closer still. I was overwhelmed by his smell, fresh and familiar. My fingers were starting to shake. I could feel the walls starting to buckle, the things I had kept hidden beginning to emerge once more. ‘When I pulled you out of that fire you were nearly dead. Even if you had gotten to her it would have been too late for both of you.’
I gaped at him, and something flashed at the back of my mind. I remembered the feeling of hands on my ankles, my shoulders, my waist, dragging me from her. ‘You pulled me out?’
He fell on to his haunches. ‘Who did you think it was?’
‘Why didn’t you let me get to her?’
‘You wouldn’t have been able to.’
My voice changed. ‘Why did you take me away from her?’
His voice changed too. Anger, fear, insistence strained his words. ‘Because you were burning alive. You did the thing I told you not to do. You jumped off the cliff.’
‘I was trying to save her!’
‘You were killing yourself!’
The walls were coming down and my mind was exploding with that night. ‘She was calling out to me.’