Then and Always Read Online Free PDF Page B

garish green color, but apart from that it all looked the same. There was a comfort in seeing that the house hadn’t been altered too dramatically, although the garden was better kept, I noticed, but then Dad had never been much of a gardener. Also, fancy wooden blinds replaced the more homely curtains that we had preferred, but basically it still looked like home.
    As I lingered on the pavement, I allowed a wave of memories to assault me, a kaleidoscope of images spanning theyears. Yet still there were no dark shadows here. Up until five years ago this was the only home I had known, and it still represented the feelings of safety and sanctuary that had eluded me anywhere else. Standing on the pavement, feeling like I still belonged there, yet at the same time knowing that I did not, I felt a dart of nostalgia pierce me. I realized with a shock that this was the first time I had actually seen the house since the night of the accident.
    The decision to move away and the packing up and sale had all been carried out during the long slow months of my hospital stay. Whether it was the right decision or not, who could say? My poor father had been desperate enough to do whatever he could to minimize my pain. Half demented with grief, I had clung to him desperately from my hospital bed and pleaded with him to let us move far away: so move we did.
    Suddenly my memories were cyanide-bitter and I turned from the house and began walking briskly away. My eyes started to water furiously as a bitter icy wind blasted my face.
    I walked head down against the gusting currents, my stride just short of a run. At the end of the street, I stopped and hesitated. I was standing at a crossroads. If it hadn’t been so heartbreakingly sad, it would almost have been funny. Although the painkillers had dulled my headache to a persistent throb, I
could
use it as an excuse not to make my next stop. But I thought I’d been hiding behind excuses for too long now.
    Unlike my old home, Jimmy’s house looked completely unchanged and exactly as I’d remembered it. It was almost as though they had preserved it as a monument to him. My hand gripped tightly on the door knocker as a fleeting glimmer of hope ran through me. Perhaps they too had moved? Sarah had never said, but then we hadn’t spoken of his familyat all in the intervening years. Some wounds just went too deep.
    If Janet was shocked by my appearance on her doorstep after a five-year absence, she hid it well. She also hid her reaction to my damaged face, which I knew she must have noticed with the wind whipping my hair about my head in long chestnut banners. I hoped I was as good at masking my own shock when I saw how much she had aged in the intervening years. Although she smiled and reached out to envelope me in a welcoming hug, the grief was so deeply etched into her face that I realized no new emotion was ever going to be powerful enough to erase it. Guilt sliced through me like a knife wound. It was
my fault
she looked like that.
My fault
she had lost her son.
    “Come in, Rachel,” she said softly. “It’s been a long time.”
    IT HADN’T BEEN an easy afternoon, and by the time I got back to the hotel, the tension and the emotions of the day had brought my headache to a crescendo of agony. My first action on returning to my room was to blindly fumble in my toiletry bag for the bottle of pills. I ignored the dosage instructions on the label and immediately dry-swallowed two tablets instead of one. As I waited for the medication to kick in, I ran a deep hot bath in the small white-tiled bathroom.
    The headache was still with me as I slid under the fragrantly perfumed water, slightly better when I emerged pink and beginning to shrivel half an hour later, and back to a dull but manageable ache when I realized it was already time to get ready for the evening.
    I tried to keep my mind away from my visit with Jimmy’s mother, though there was much I needed to consider aboutwhat she had said