Page 21 of Love You However

And the scariest part? I didn’t know how to get it back.

Chapter Twenty

Seeing my sister’s face in the photos brought to my attention that I needed to go up to the cemetery where she was buried and do some maintenance of her grave. The events of the last few weeks had pushed it down on my list of priorities. Unlike my parents, who’d moved up to Bude about ten years after leaving Scotland, she and her family had chosen to stay down here in Miltree like me. As a result, she was buried in the local cemetery, about ten minutes’ drive away. The next day was forecast to be nice, so before I went to bed I vowed to go up there after work. Perhaps being in her presence – even if she wasn’t really there, just ashes under the ground – would help to calm me.

Thursday dawned bright and sunny – albeit chilly – so after seeing Petra off to work, I donned a jacket and drove up to the cemetery. The month of May on the West coast of England still had a bite to it at times, but I was one of those people who didn’t feel the cold. A product of my upbringing in the chilly Scottish Highlands, perhaps, as Lyndsey had been the same. My constant warmth (even more so now with the menopause) had led to Petra’s nickname for me as her little Scotch bonnet. I wasn’t quite as warm as that chilli – one of the hottest in the world, I had read – but the nickname made me smile all the same.

True to form, I shed the jacket after a few minutes of working at the gravestone. The spring had sent the grass around it on a growth spurt, so I took my scissors to it, then washed down the stone and the pebbles around it. Nobody else did it these days – in the early days after her death, her husband Gareth had done this more than me, as had Mum and Dad. But now Gareth and the boys had moved, and Mum and Dad were gone, so it was just me. I got up here much more frequently than I did Mum’s and Dad’s. It had only been a handful of weeks since I’d been here, but working on the spot broke me out into quite a sweat.

“There we go,” I said aloud when I was satisfied. “You’re looking good again. Not that you weren’t before, but I’ve polished you up.”

A memory arose unbidden of the later stages of her cancer. She’d never particularly cared about how she looked, but she and Gareth had been invited to a wedding of a close friend and she’d wanted to look the part, despite her dwindling energy levels. I’d helped her get ready, doing her makeup and painting her nails while she half-dozed, noting how skeletal she was becoming as I helped her into the dress. I now treasured this memory as she’d died four months later, and here I was today, still making sure she looked her best even though things had changed so much since then.

Petra had been up here once or twice, but she strongly disliked graveyards. In fact, she shied away from anything family-related, thanks to her bad experiences with her own. Nonetheless, she had always supported me in my grief, allowing me the time and space to talk about Lyndsey whenever she crossed my mind, which was often. My sister and I had been joined at the hip, after all, even after she got married and became a mother. Despite the nine-year age difference.

“I miss you, Lynds,” I said aloud now. “My life is a whole lot poorer without you in it. Petra didn’t fill the gap you left behind, not by a long stretch, but she filled other gaps. I’ve simply built myself around the grief, just like you said.”

That was another crucial memory of mine, and one that never failed to bring tears to my eyes. By this point she had been almost entirely bed-bound, her voice no more than a rasp, and I had all but moved in to help take care of her, Gareth and the boys. They’d been at work or school during the day, and I’d managed to get compassionate leave from work, leaving us some valuable sister-on-sister time. We’d been watching Breaking Bad on the television in their room, but neither of us were following the plot. Lyndsey didn’t have the energy to even talk any more, but she’d held my hand. Then she’d started squeezing it urgently.

“What?” I’d said, sitting up quickly. “What’s the matter?”

“Listen,” she’d whispered. I’d shuffled closer and put my ear to her mouth.

“What?” I murmured again when she didn’t say any more.

“You’ll be okay, when I’m gone, won’t you?”

“I don’t know, Lynds, I honestly don’t.” Not the best thing to have said, with hindsight, but I was so taken aback that honesty was my default response.

“You will. Eventually. You’ll build yourself around the grief. And I’ll be watching you from up there, with the biggest smile on my face. So don’t be afraid to carry on with your life, okay?”

“Okay,” I murmured. Tears had begun to pour down my cheeks. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

She’d died ten days later. I wiped away my tears and hiccupped.

Of course, I had been okay. In the long run. The short-term aftermath of her death had been disastrous for us all. A grief-stricken Gareth had ploughed his way through the funeral, then announced he was putting the house up for sale. He was moving himself and the boys up to Scotland, near to where Lyndsey and I had been born. It was to feel closer to her, he said, and that was that. They’d been gone within eight weeks, and I had fallen apart.

But I tried not to think about that these days.

After about fifteen minutes, I put on my jacket again and stood up.

“Chin up, yeah?” I said to her, kissed my hand and patted the stone. I felt a little better, as I knew I would, and the grave certainly looked better. Now it was time to go home and tread on eggshells, with my wife mired in the tension that she seemed to be living in at the moment.

Chapter Twenty-One

Having said that, things began to improve in the run-up to Whitsun. Now the dust had settled following the sudden change in circumstances, the atmosphere between us became less combustive. It was still uneasy, but we seemed to be arguing less, for which I would be ever grateful. Her days still remained long while she scrambled to keep up, and some days she wouldn’t get through the door until gone nine, at which point she was half-zombie. Whitsun was getting closer by the day, and I hoped that the week off would bring her some rest. In fact, I found myself quietly optimistic that the restorative effects of the half-term holiday ahead would give us enough of a boost to power through the final six and a half weeks of the school year.

That was, at least, until two days before the holiday, when Petra stalked through the door with the language of her entire body screaming of stress. To be fair to her, she did smile at me, and returned my peck on the cheek.

“Tolerable day?” I asked her, trying not to recoil at her excruciatingly strong perfume. ‘Tolerable’ was the adjective I had taken to using in place of ‘good’ when asking this question, for I had learned that by now, the adjectives used to describe her days swung between a spectrum of ‘tolerable’ to ‘fucking unbearable’, nothing better.

“Depends what you define by tolerable,” she said with a shrug, hanging her rain jacket up on the hook. “How was yours?”

She didn’t always ask the question back, so I proceeded to tell her about my day, including about one particularly bitchy customer I’d dealt with at work that morning. I was intending to make her laugh – rude customers were part and parcel of the job, after all, and this one was by no means the worst I’d ever experienced – but I was just hitting my stride when Petra cut me off.

“Okay, okay, okay, okay,” she said dismissively. I froze mid-sentence and squinted at her through the door of the utility room, where she was getting changed. I could see her jaw was clenched and she actually looked furious.

“What’s the matter?” I said, and she tossed her head like a wet hen trying to settle her feathers.

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