“I was… I was in a really terrible car crash,” she says, her lower lip trembling. “And it’s stuck with me. Obviously.” She waves a hand at her disheveled face, the scars.
Audrey nods with a knowing expression. “I used to have nightmares too. For a long time. After the war. My poor aunt Minna didn’t know what to do for the best. I terrified the guests out of their wits during one particularly dreadful episode, back in my thirties sometime. At any rate,” she continues, “I wasn’t fine. I was reliving some horrible moments. I’d wake up sure it was still happening, and then be devastated that it had already occurred in the past. That I couldn’t change it. I’d scream and thrash like you were. It was dreadful.”
Kate searches Audrey’s eyes, looking for validation that she isn’t mad, or pathetic. “What were you remembering? During yours? Did you… did you lose people? In the war?” She wonders now whether Audrey had ever been married or had children.
Audrey hesitates, but Kate sees the memories, whatever they are, pass across her face, a flitting shadow. “It’s not something I talk about,” she replies. Her white brows knit together. “It was a bad crash, you said?”
Kate presses her tongue against the inside of her teeth. “Yeah. Both my parents were killed.”
There’s genuine concern in the stubborn look that usually pinches the old woman’s thin lips into a tight pucker. “I’m very sorry. And what did that do to you?”
Kate sits, speechless. Any time anyone asked her about the crash, one of her old friends, the doctors, the police… everyone always asked “what happened?” They always wanted to know the how. The factual step-by-step of tragedy.
This happened, then that, and then I was an orphan.
No one ever asked what being the sole survivor had done to her. Not even Adam. Kate had often wondered whether people just couldn’t bear to hear the reality of it, to imagine themselves adrift in that kind of fucked-up, impossible grief. So they didn’t ask.
Now Kate struggles to pin down the answer to Audrey’s question. The words wriggle out of her grasp and a sense of inadequacy settles over her shoulders, the same weight as shame.
“I’m not sure I know the full extent of it yet.”
She realizes, as she speaks, that this is the most honest thing she’s admitted in a long time. To Audrey James, of all people.
Audrey is quiet for a moment. “I know a thing or two about being the survivor, Kate. Some days I doubt whether it really does beat the alternative. But if it’s the hand we’re dealt by chance, then it’s what we must accept.”
Kate’s throat tightens. “Haunts a person though, doesn’t it?”
Audrey doesn’t answer. She has her secrets.
“What do you do with the grief, then?” Kate asks. “Where do you put it, if you don’t talk about it?”
“I don’t entirely understand the question.”
Kate shrugs. “How do you process it?”
Audrey sighs irritably. “No offence intended, my dear, but your generation seems particularly fixated on individual emotion. On processing everything, like you’re an assembly line for feelings. A person could spend their life obsessing over the past. Seems rather exhausting and dramatic to me. In my day, we just got on with it. Kept on keeping on, as they say.”
“But you still had nightmares,” Kate presses. “Do you think you were really getting on with it?” She points to the black notebook on her bedside table. “I write in my journal. It helps to get it out. Have you ever tried that?”
Audrey pushes herself up from the bed with a grunt. “I really don’t see the point of that. The past is the past. There’s no changing it. And it’s a fool’s errand to pretend we can. Now get some sleep.”
She stumbles a little on the rug but steadies herself, makes her way toward the door.
“Can you leave it open?” Kate asks, feeling childish the moment she says it.
Audrey glances over her shoulder, nods. “Of course. I don’t much like closed doors either.”
When Kate rises later that morning, the rain has stopped and the landscape outside her window is green and fresh. Maybe she’ll go for a run, figure out a route around the inn and the town, but first she needs a hot shower to wake her up. She didn’t sleep much after her conversation with Audrey, her curiosity piqued by the woman’s vague answers. What were her nightmares about? What has she survived? Rubbing her tired eyes, Kate staggers to the bathroom.
Once she’s clean and dressed, she calls for Ozzie, who is still dozing at the end of the bed. But as they round the corner toward the stairs, she stops in her tracks.
“Oh shit.”
Water drips in a steady rhythm from the ceiling, and the runner beneath it is drenched. Kate darts back into her room for the bin under the sink, then places it beneath the leak and hurries downstairs, Ozzie at her heels, keen for his breakfast.
She finds Audrey in the dining room, poring over that morning’s newspaper with a steaming coffee and a large seven-day pill case. She pours a small pile of multicoloured tablets into her hand before knocking them back with a wince.
“We’ve got a problem,” Kate tells her, taking in the pill case. Her grandmother used to use one of those. She’d been on about eight different medications in her last years. “The ceiling is leaking in the corridor upstairs.”
Audrey sets the paper down on the table with a crackle of newsprint and an aggrieved sigh. “Where?”
“Right outside the Oak Room. I used a bin to catch it for now, but the rug is soaked. Shall I call a handyman for you?”
“No, no, I’ll deal with it. You have your breakfast.” Audrey heaves herself up from the table. She’s using her cane today.
“Are you sure?”
Kate feels torn—shouldn’t this be something she should handle? Isn’t that why she’s here? She watches Audrey’s gnarled hand grip her cane and thinks back to what she said about having lost so many people. Maybe keeping on really is the only way she knows to cope.
“Yes, eat,” Audrey says. “One should never starve when there’s perfectly good food to be had. Save your restraint for times of scarcity, I say. I’ll ring Ian.”
“Who’s Ian?” Kate asks, but Audrey is already walking away.
An hour later, Kate is back up on the third floor. Audrey had forgotten a doctor’s appointment scheduled for nine o’clock. She called Sue for a ride into town, and left Kate to sort out the leak with Ian the handyman.
“When did it start?” he asks her from his perch on the stepladder.
He isn’t what Kate expected. He’s probably a couple of years older than her, with slightly untidy brown hair and black-framed glasses. He arrived in khakis and a cable cardigan, altogether looking far more like an analyst or librarian than a labourer.
