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Teddy took the bin bag from her and the weight in his hand was significant. This was a woman’s whole life as she knew it, right here. He felt a rush of emotion and couldn’t have unpicked the various strands that made it up if he’d tried, but he knew that pity and anger and relief were heading up the list of dominants.
‘Let’s get you home,’ said Marielle. She took a firm hold on Sabrina’s arm, guiding her forwards. She looked broken, thought Teddy. He couldn’t even guess at what was going through her head.
They walked to the car barely saying anything. Marielle thought that if she started talking she wouldn’t be able to shut up and maybe that was better done when they got home. Teddy drove in silence; his mother was sitting in the back with Sabrina, sniffing, beyond upset at the turn of this morning’s events. He could almost hear the ‘what if’s coursing through her mind.What if they hadn’t found her? What if she’d disappeared from them without a trace? What if she’d been so disorientated that she’d had a worse accident?They were the same ‘what if’s that were racing through his own brain.
Teddy followed them into Big Moon. He put the bin bag down then switched the kettle on while Marielle fussed around Sabrina, pushing her onto the sofa, placing a throwover her shoulders because she was shivering. She was so pale. Marielle couldn’t believe they had said she could go home at the hospital; if she’d still been a nurse, she would have made a strong case for admitting her.
Teddy put a mug down on the coffee table in front of her and sat down next to her. He took her hands in his own much larger ones and held them, warming them to rid them of the trembling.
‘Tessa said you fell getting off a bus,’ said Marielle, her voice quiet, as soothing as she could make it.
‘I saw someone I thought I recognised,’ said Sabrina eventually, imagining him, the scarecrow man who’d been at the beginning of it all, and now at the end. She raised her head.
‘Marielle, Teddy… I know who I am.’
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Chapter 40
Sabrina had no idea why the man who looked like a scarecrow should have been the one to blast down the wall in her head behind which so much was hidden. He had been a terrible key because she knew now that Eddie and Rina had not been her parents but her uncle and aunt and she’d lost them both years earlier than she’d thought. She hadn’t seen them grow old together, enjoying a long and happy life: those memories had all been false, manufactured by a brain that had seized an opportunity to hold on to them for longer. Their dear, beloved lives had been cut tragically short when she was just a little girl and the place where they died was somehow linked to a scarecrow in a field. But they had brought her to Shoresend with them once and that’s why this place was so special, synonymous with happiness for her, and that’s why she had come here again in need of solace.
When she drove to Shoresend it had taken hours, so she hadn’t come from the immediate vicinity. She could remember throwing her car keys on the grass towards someone because she had no choice but to do so. He looked like the scarecrow man at the bus stop, maybe that’s why hehad sprung the lock, but they couldn’t be the same person because the man at the bus stop had helped her, sat with her until the ambulance came apparently. She knew that her mind had a habit of attaching nasty things to scarecrows; they’d become a symbol of darkness for her since that terrible crash which had changed the course of her life.
She knew she was a business analyst, without any question. And she was definitely called Sabrina Anderson because that name fitted her like a tailor-made jacket. She’d been called after her auntie Rina, she was in no doubt of those few facts about herself.
But there were still great gaping potholes surrounding the few solid chunks of certainties. There was no violent, unhinged fiend that she needed to hide from; god knows where her mind had conjured that thought up from, but then imaginations often warped and caricatured for their own reasons. She could see the actual man she lived with, but only as a vague outline, and he wasn’t someone to fear. Why wasn’t he clearer, though, and why did she not have any feeling that she missed him? There was something about a wedding that was pertinent. She thought she might have been a bridesmaid, but surely that was unlikely at her age.
‘I know all this and I’m no further forward,’ she said to Teddy and Marielle. Her eyes were shiny from tears; they spilled over and down her cheeks, a flow that refused to stop.
‘I really think you need to rest, darling,’ said Marielle.
‘What aren’t you telling us?’ asked Teddy gently, sensing there was something.
There was and she didn’t want to say because it would make it real. It would dissolve her one solid treasure in an acid of reality. The truth had already taken her parents awayfrom her and it hadn’t finished with her at that because she remembered now being in the hospital holding her newborn daughter in her arms, knowing that every minute brought her closer to having to let her go.
‘My daughter isn’t working her way around Australia,’ said Sabrina. ‘She was stillborn many years ago.’
Teddy’s arms closed around her and his mother’s around them both. There was nothing to say for the moment that their embrace couldn’t say better.
Sabrina went to bed soon after. She said she was tired, but it was a lie. She just couldn’t hold up any longer, not even in front of these dear, kind people. She needed to be alone.
She wished she had never met the scarecrow man. She had prayed for the truth, she had thought she was ready for it, but he had brought it to her and she wasn’t. She had lost memories she’d never even had. There had been no decades of picnics and barbecues in Ed and Rina’s cottage garden, nor happy family Christmases that she’d hoped the truth would wash ashore for her. Instead it had smashed into her skull like a tidal wave and dragged every sweet illusion far out to sea. And Linnet, whom her well-meaning brain had decided to ripen into a vibrant young woman and send to Australia to have adventures and fun, was merely a colourful, beautiful fantasy. All Sabrina had left of her now was that tiny baby with a perfect face and dark hair, whose eyes would never open, whose mouth would never form the word ‘Mama’, never stretch into her first smile.
She had never fully excised the grief; she had never got over the loss. And now she had lost her all over again and it was every bit as painful as the first time. Sabrina pushed her head into her pillow and cried silently and hard untilsleep eventually took pity on her and pulled her into a deep, dreamless oblivion.
The next morning, Sabrina was awoken by a quiet tapping on her bedroom door. Then it slowly opened and Marielle appeared, holding a mug.
‘You’ve slept for over sixteen hours,’ she said gently.
