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It had been a very bad day; the culmination of a long string of bad days. Her family and friends had been enormously kind immediately after Harry’s death but as the months crawled by they had all moved on with their own lives and expected practical, down-to-earth Kalera to buckle down and do the same. She had done her best to justify everyone’s confidence in her ability to ‘get over’ the awful tragedy that had shattered her life, reasoning that eventually the calm acceptance that she was projecting would become a reality. But the opposite had proved true and the serene façade had become increasingly fragile. She’d felt hollow inside, scoured out by an awful sense of helplessness that rendered her horribly vulnerable to the loneliness that constantly ached in the marrow of her bones.
For a whole six months she had managed to convince herself and everyone else that she was coping magnificently well and then the whole fragile edifice had crashed to the ground—over something as ridiculous as a simple typing error.
It had been late one afternoon and Duncan had called her into his office to query some missing words in a confidential memo which completely altered his intended meaning. In typically extravagant fashion he’d gone on to proclaim that her fetish for editing his colourful language was in danger of ruining his business, that she was turning his correspondence into drab, grey, conformist tracts which were boring his clients into questioning his creativity.
In the middle of this silly piece of teasing Kalera had horrified them both by bursting into tears, and Duncan had practically leapt over the desk to get to her before she could flee for a dark corner in which to hide her embarrassing attack of emotion.
‘I know, I know…I miss Harry too,’ he said hoarsely, sweeping her shuddering body against his large frame, devastating her with his instant empathy and willingness to tackle the subject that everyone else had been tactfully avoiding. ‘It still hurts, doesn’t it, baby? You can tell me. You just cry it all out…’
She had no choice; once started, the flood of grief was impossible to stop. All the horror, all the fear, all the anguish of the day that Harry died came pouring out as Duncan sat beside her on his couch, alternately patting her back and warming her cold hands between his, dabbing at her soggy face with his brightly checked handkerchief and doing far more good with his vague, nonsensical murmurs than had the intrusively helpful woman from Victim Support or the bland psychologist paid for by the Accident Compensation Commission.
Not that there had been anything accidental about Harry’s death. She still found it difficult to believe that her quiet, modest, slow-talking, unadventurous husband had died a national hero.
He and Kalera had been lunching at a peaceful, open-air tourist spot when a madman had started spraying gunfire, killing five and wounding a dozen others, including several children. While panic-stricken patrons had cowered behind flimsy wooden tables or attempted to flee the chaos of blood and screams, Harry had launched himself into the firing line to protect a mother and her baby daughter, saving their lives at the cost of his own.
Bleeding from a massive chest wound, he had somehow still found the strength to grab the barrel of the gun as the blank-eyed gunman stepped up to deliver the coup de grâce, and the police psychiatrist had speculated afterwards that perhaps Harry’s action had jolted the man out of his automaton-like state long enough to realise that there could be only one escape from the consequences of his actions, for he had suddenly turned his weapon on himself, ending his murderous spree with a bullet to the brain.
It had all happened so fast that there had barely been time to react and yet as Kalera had crawled out from behind the metal rubbish drum where she and Harry had taken cover time had seemed to slow almost to a stop, her movements seeming painfully sluggish and ineffectual as she’d frantically pushed at the dead gunman’s heavy body in an effort to free her husband from its macabre embrace. In what had seemed like an interminable wait for the police and emergency services to arrive, Harry’s life-blood had gushed through her fingers and soaked into the gravel on which he was sprawled. In typical fashion he had whispered to her not to worry and in the ambulance on the way to the hospital she had watched helplessly as the life quietly leaked out of his torn body, had leaned over him and smiled into his rapidly clouding eyes, talking desperately about the future even as she felt an ominous clenching in her lower abdomen.
Harry had lapsed into unconsciousness and died before they reached the hospital…died believing that at least part of him would live on in the long-awaited child that nestled in her womb. To Kalera it seemed bitterly ironic that she’d survived the vicious hail of bullets without a physical scratch, only to miscarry her baby two days later. A coincidence, the doctor had assured her, but she’d chosen to add the loss of her tiny daughter to the list of the gunman’s victims. It was easier to accept that the miscarriage had been caused by trauma and stress than by the fact that the precious life that she and Harry had conceived out of their love might have been too flawed to survive.
Sometimes, in her darkest hours, she even blamed her husband for his fatal act of heroism, for choosing to abandon those he loved to protect two total strangers.
‘Why? Why did he have to play the hero like that?’ she had sobbed into Duncan’s chest.
‘He wasn’t playing, he was just being true to himself.’ The deep voice rumbling in her ear was for once calm and measured. ‘Guys like Harry—decent, compassionate men who hate to see other people hurt and have the courage to act on their convictions—are life’s real heroes, you know, not the macho, aggressive, fearless warriors that you see glorified in big-budget action movies. What he did was instinctive to his nature—he was trying to help someone more vulnerable than himself.’
‘But what about me?’ It was a bewildered cry of angry betrayal. ‘He left me alone, and I was his wife…I was vulnerable too!’ Her hand clenched unknowingly over her empty womb. ‘He had nothing to defend himself with—how did he expect to stop a man with a gun?’
Duncan swallowed her cold fist in his warm grip, prising it away from her stomach to rest against his reassuringly solid breastbone. ‘He must have believed you were safe where you were—out of sight, whereas that young woman was right there in the killer’s path, struggling to get her baby out of her broken push-chair. You said there was no time to think, so Harry wasn’t worrying about consequences, he was just reacting to his gut feelings…’
‘All I felt was fear. I froze up—’ She choked, her head sinking with shame as she remembered how she had shivered at Harry’s side as they had crouched behind the painted bin.
A forceful hand cupped her delicate jaw, lifting her tear-str
eaked face so that she was looking directly into dark blue eyes ablaze with a fierce emotion that was startling in its intensity.
‘I’m glad you did. It probably saved your life. If you’d followed Harry you would have been shot too. You might have died, or been badly maimed like some of the others. Don’t expect me to be anything but grateful that it didn’t happen.’
His palm shaped her pale cheek, his fingertips resting on the throbbing pulse at her temple, making her vividly aware of the life that coursed through her veins. No, she hadn’t wanted to die, and she didn’t regret surviving, being whole…
‘But I should have tried to stop him,’ she whispered. ‘One moment he was beside me, the next he was gone. I could have stopped him…’
‘You had no control over the situation at the time and you can’t assume it in hindsight. There was nothing you could have done, Kalera, and no amount of torturing yourself over futile what ifs is going to change that fact. Only one person is responsible for what happened that day.’
‘He deserved to die,’ she grated bitterly, still unwilling and unable to feel any compassion for the man whose refusal to take medication for his depressive illness had resulted in such senseless carnage. ‘Harry didn’t.’
‘No.’
Braced for a response that preached the healing qualities of forgiveness, Duncan’s simple acknowledgement of her right to bitterness reopened the floodgates.
‘Today would have been our sixth wedding anniversary,’ she admitted in a wobbly voice as the tears dripped down her face, gathering in the V-shaped dam formed by the web of his thumb and forefinger and spilling over the back of his hand.
‘Ah, Kalera…’ There was a wealth of understanding in his voice as he bent to rest his forehead against hers, rolling it slowly back and forth, ironing out her crumpled brow. ‘No wonder you’re feeling so alone…’
‘And tomorrow—tomorrow is the day that my baby was due to be born,’ she wept, abandoning herself to his sheltering strength.
Duncan was the only other person at work who had known about her pregnancy—something that he had guessed for himself even before her suspicions were medically confirmed. Dismayed by the acuteness of his perception, she had reason to be grateful that he had respected her plea not to mention her condition to anyone else, for it was barely two weeks later that tragedy had struck—two weeks during which she and Harry had hugged their secret joy to themselves, savouring the fact that they were to become parents at last.
