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But, no matter what he had endured in the last couple of years, it seemed he hadn’t been emptied of all aspiration as he had thought. His instincts were whispering just loud enough that he couldn’t shout them down.
Siena. Maybe he ought to … what? Ask her on a date while she was in town? Send her flowers? Write her a card? It had been so long since he had done this he wondered if the rules had changed. Did you call a person these days or was it all about sending provocative text messages on one’s mobile—?
A noise came through the intercom. His ears pricked up. A shuffling of sheets, a small sniffle, then Kane settled again.
Kane. That one word silenced his whispering instincts in one fell swoop. He had been so busy thinking about what he wanted, what he needed, that he had plumb forgotten about Kane.
James again ran hands through his already over-mussed hair, this time in order to rub away the sudden pounding in his head.
Surely he was messing with forces he had no business messing with. Though Siena was like chalk to Dinah’s cheese in many ways, she was young, she lived a four-hour plane flight away and drove in red high heels, for goodness’ sake.
And everyone—counsellors, teachers, friends and books and websites alike—all agreed that what Kane needed was time.
His head swimming, James opened his laptop and found the blank weblog page he was looking for.
The one time he had been in such a bad way as to go to counsellors for himself, they had suggested he keep a diary, as though getting his feelings out of his head and down on paper would make it easier to cope.
As a man of the computer age, he had used the blog format instead. Having his words floating out there in the ether made them feel like more of a release than if they were written on paper and tied up in a ribbon at the bottom of his sock drawer, hidden, as though they were a dirty secret.
He cracked his knuckles, freeing up the wave of information he would have to wade through before he could even think about getting to sleep.
And he began to type.
Showered and changed into her favourite red crushed velvet pyjamas—soft, comfortable, easy to pack and a little bit sexy just in case—Siena leant back against a pile of fat frilly floral cushions on the lumpy spare bed and laid her laptop on her thighs as she shuffled her mouse and set to opening her emails.
Despite the PDA’s beeping insistence that it ought to be, her schedule wasn’t there as yet, which only gave her further heebie-jeebies about what Max had in store for her with his ‘fabulous career move'. What else could no schedule mean but no more flights?
There was one email from Parisian Raoul with a subject title so risqué it made her laugh out loud. But it also made Rick’s accusation echo in her head. A guy in every port … Well, why the heck not? It made her romantic life innocuous and uncomplicated and that was just the way she liked it.
She made a move to open Raoul’s email when noises in the hallway drew Siena’s gaze to her closed bedroom door. Rick must have been putting the kids to bed. She looked to the clock at the side of her bed to find it was some time after eight.
Her fleeting glance slammed to a halt as she saw the white iceberg rose James had given her lying provocatively on the bedside table.
She reached out and took the rose in her hand, the sweet scent tickling at her nose. It only brought about a strange sense memory of diesel fuel, disinfectant and wood shavings. Who knew such a strange mix of scents could be so evocative?
Before she really knew what she was about to do, Siena ignored Raoul’s email and instead typed out a row of letters in the webpage line of her internet browser. She hesitated only a moment before pressing the Enter key.
Within seconds a simple black page loaded on to her screen. And as the word ‘DINAH’ caught her eye she slammed her laptop shut.
What was she doing? Spying on him? Well, of course she was. But what did it matter? Now she had her PDA back—the PDA which he himself had admitted to snooping through!—she was never going to see the guy again. So how could it hurt to read a very little more?
Slowly, slowly she lifted the screen. There were no photographs on the site. No links. No comment boxes. It was simply the emotional outpourings of an anonymous guy. Anonymous to anyone who might stumble upon it, but not to her.
Siena shuffled lower on her bed and picked out sporadic posts. She read about the home video collection James had edited together for Dinah’s funeral which he still let Kane watch in his bedroom on bad nights. She read about odd floating memories of his time with Dinah’s dysfunctional family, her alcoholic mother and deadbeat ex, and she understood a little why he saw himself as Kane’s only hope. He revealed moments when he had felt like giving up, and worse, the moments when he verbally slapped himself for even contemplating it.
A good hour later she dragged herself out of deep tunnel vision when she tasted her own tears on her lips. But she couldn’t bring herself to wipe them away.
In one post from a few months before, James had obviously not even taken the time to edit himself, or to spell check; he had merely poured his feelings out on to the page then hit send, forever capturing his raw emotions.
Saturday, 4:12pm
I went to a memorial today at the Coral Lane Centre for my neighbours husband. Carl passed away two years ago and Dorothy had organised a trip to his favourite pub for his closets friends.
Dorothy and Carl had been togherther for 58 years. Dinah and I’d had just on five.
Dorothy and I have been spending time chatting over the back shrub a couple of times a week since Dinah passed away. We talk of about current affairs, we talk of Kane and how he is coping, nothing deep or specific, skirting around
the issue … But it has been helpful all the same.
