The Reunion

to forgive you. I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life asking for forgiveness. You don’t deserve that.’ She closed her eyes and he kissed her, lightly, on her lips. He tried to think of a response, but she wasn’t done. Eyes still shut, she said: ‘I want our life to be about us, to be about now.’ Her voice faltered a little. ‘I don’t want to live with ghosts.’
    He reached around her and pulled her closer. ‘I know you don’t, love.’
    He’d never quite been able to explain to her that he
did
want to live with ghosts. It was his way of accepting what happened, his path to redemption. And it wasn’t about torturing himself, which is exactly what Nat would have thought. Every day, he thought of him. That was how he coped. That was how he lived with it.
    He didn’t think, at first, that he would be able to. He gave himself a week. Get through that week and then we’ll see. The morning of the funeral, six days after the accident, he got up early. He and Lilah were staying in a grubby B&B in the centre of Cork, the room was cramped and too warm with no air conditioning. When they opened the windows the sounds from the street made it impossible to sleep. Lilah slept. She had some pills she’d got from her mother.
    Andrew took one of her cigarettes and leaned out over the railing, looking down two storeys to the street below, and smoked. The sun shone maddeningly bright, it was warm already, even at seven in the morning, and it was loud, too: the noise of bottles clinking, the thump of beer barrels slamming onto the street. The cigarette made him retch, he only ever touched them when he was drunk and that morning he was terrifyingly sober. He felt hyper-aware: of the unpleasant tickle of nicotine on the inside of his mouth, his T-shirt clinging to his lower back with sweat, the sound of Lilah breathing behind him, the sense of terror rising, from the pit of his stomach, into his chest and then to his throat. He thought of Jen, whom he hadn’t seen in five days, not since the morning after, at the hospital. He thought of Natalie, still unconscious. He thought of Maggie, Conor’s mother. He thought, briefly, of the fact that with a minimum of effort he could pitch forward over this railing and it would be over.
    Later, as he tried to tie his shoelaces with shaking hands, he realised that after this week, there would be another one, and another one after that, and that he would have to try to find a way to get through all those days and weeks, because he knew in his heart that he would not be pitching himself over any railings, not today or any other day. Lilah came out of the bathroom, knelt at his feet and kissed him. He could smell the alcohol on her breath. It was quarter to nine in the morning. ‘You sure about this?’ she asked him.
    He wasn’t, he was terrified, but he went anyway. He didn’t have everything figured out, not until later, and not without help. But that day was the starting point. Since he was never going to be able to live without it, he had to live with it. And, ridiculous as it sounded, he now lived if not comfortably, then at the very least peacefully with Conor’s ghost.
    Nat’s eyes were closed – the pills made her drowsy, he thought she might have drifted off to sleep – but when he tried to move away, she slipped her arm around him. He drew her in closer, whispered into her hair.
    ‘There was more to us, you know, than sadness and hurt and blame, wasn’t there? Don’t you remember? How we once were?’

 
     
    Thursday 21 November 1996
    Dearest Andrew,
    I hope this letter finds you well. I have just finished writing another, which will be sent to the trial judge as a reference of your character. Since I want, as best I can, to ease the suffering that you are feeling, I thought I would let you know what I have said.
    The judge will know, of course, that you are now and have always been an honest, law-abiding, hard-working young man. They don’t need me to tell them that. There are records, I’ve no doubt, of your academic and other achievements, those achievements that can be measured with grades or rewarded with prizes. Some things, though, aren’t so easily quantified.
    So I have told them of your goodness. That you were a loyal friend to my son, a man he looked up to, a man he counted on. I told them that of Conor’s group of friends, I would identify you not only as the kindest among them, but the most responsible. I know full well that you