Emilia's

By R.A Wright

Fathomless darkness stretching out around her, above her, inside her - that was what night was like after she lost Matty. The world collapsed, turned in on itself, and hope burned away. The glowing tails of comets fizzed and went out like dud fireworks. Any sparks that remained were consumed by the massive black hole left behind by Matty's death.

For Aucklander Hanna, a move to Napier means the chance for a fresh start. In Napier, no one knows Matty. No one knows he lived with Cystic Fibrosis. No one knows he died because of it, and no one knows Jo. Here, she's just Hanna. A new name; a new beginning. Until she meets Jon. With Jon, Hanna finds herself on an unplanned journey of acceptance and healing. Matty will always be with her, but maybe it's time to let go.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LMEFPress
• Release date: Mar 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9780473617349

Book preview

DECEMBER 2011

The small grey stones shifted beneath Hanna’s bare calves. Hot, smooth pebbles stuck to her skin as she squirmed to find a more comfortable position on the quiet beach. Just one afternoon on Napier’s stony beach made her miss the sandy ones of her home city, made her heart ache just a little more for Auckland.

Shielding her eyes from the glare with a hand, Hanna gazed out over the flat expanse of calm, blue water, and took in the distant cape that jutted out beyond the bay. It had a name, that she couldn't recall now, and reasons to visit, although none had piqued her interest enough to follow through with her half-hearted promises to make the drive there. She might in the future, might rent a car, pack a lunch and explore, should she find the enthusiasm, or the desire. She might do this, and so much more - if she ever stopped feeling numb.

Hanna had spent the last nine months of her life completely numb, and arguably the nine years before that too. If she didn't feel anything, then she wouldn’t cry.

You’d hate it here, Matty, she whispered to the ocean. The waves crashed ever closer to her feet, and she watched as the water was sucked back out again by dangerous unseen currents. The water of Hawke Bay, seemingly calm beyond the small breakers, was more deadly than it appeared. She had heard the warnings; she knew she was better off not swimming out there - and Matty would have hated that. Scoffing at another rule to be broken, he would have rushed into the water anyway, determined to conquer the currents despite the warnings. He had never let anyone tell him what he couldn’t do.

Like live.

Even when the feared ‘R’ word had been spoken, even when he had been given the remainder of his life in weeks, he had refused to accept it.

Rejection could go to Hell.

With her eyes still fixed on the cape in the distance, Hanna ran a fingertip over the smooth gold band of the ring that sat snug on her middle finger. It was all she allowed herself to cling to now, the only reminder of him in this new life she was starting for herself in Napier.

And Matty would have hated Napier and its small library, the one-hour travel time for a decent beach, and the museum with doors closed for renovations. The city boy, who lost himself in libraries, and wandered tirelessly through museums, would have been driven mad here - which was why she had come. Perhaps in Napier she might find the pieces of her younger self, the parts that had been lighter and warmer. The parts that had allowed her to smile. The pieces she had lost when she lost Matty.

Hanna’s phone vibrated on the stones beside her knee, her ring tone drowning out the crash of the waves and the seagulls’ cries. Fiona, her oldest friend, had been texting her all morning and Hanna was yet to respond to a single message. The phone call had been inevitable. She reached down, her hand shaking as it hovered above the phone, and she fought to convince herself to pick it up and answer the call.

Sucking in a deep, uneven breath, she swiped a finger across the display and brought the phone to her ear. Hey, Fi, she answered, her voice even, calm, as though she wasn’t currently resisting the urge to throw her phone into the ocean and forget it had ever existed.

Johanna! her friend chastised, sounding more like Hanna's mother than her best friend. Are you ignoring my texts?

Hanna released a soft sigh while her fingers turned stones over. Her eyes scanned each pebble, searched for a smooth one to skip across the surface of the azure ocean. Yes.

Why?

She closed her hand around a smooth, flat stone and held it tight in her fist. I’m settling in.

Fiona snorted. I doubt that.

Hanna opened her fist and glanced down at the grey stone lying flat in her palm. I'm trying to ease myself out of big city mode. A small smile played on her lips, but she didn’t need to look into a mirror to know it didn’t reach her eyes. When Fiona didn't respond, Hanna added, Napier's fine, really it is, and it’s only short-term. I think I could get used to life here.

Okay, hon, Fiona said, but even down the line Hanna could hear the sadness in her tone. But why’d you leave us, Jo?

Jo. She hadn’t been looking forward to hearing herself being called that again. A new city, a new name. Matty had called her Joey, just as only she had called him Matty. To others, they had been Matt and Jo. Jo and Matt. The two crazy kids who were determined to make it no matter what. Mortality be damned. Without him, she wasn’t Jo anymore.

Because I had to get out of there, Hanna said into the phone, the words a little broken after pushing past the jagged lump in her throat. I kept seeing him in everything. Every place I went held a memory of him, and no one, including you, knew how to act around me after he died. I just... She paused and gathered her thoughts. I need to be somewhere where no one knows me, where no one knows he ever existed. I was with him for almost ten years, Fi. A decade of my life, a time when I was growing up and finding my identity. Now that identity's gone. Her last words came out as a whisper. Her life had been so interwoven with his that without him she didn’t know who she was anymore. Pushing herself to her feet, finding her balance on the hot stones, she took a couple of painful steps, the soles of her feet burning as she made her way to where the waves broke. The cool water soothed her skin, and she tossed the pebble, watched it skip across the surface, once, twice, three times, before it dropped from sight and sank to the ocean floor.

After a moment’s silence, as though Fiona was watching it too, her best friend replied, Well I fucking miss you. I miss dragging you out even when you didn’t feel like it, because you needed the company whether you’d admit to it or not. I knew you were sad, Jo, but you had valid reasons, and I love you no matter what. Fiona paused and took an audible breath. When you’re ready, come back to me, come back to your family? We’ll all still be here, and we’ll still love you even if you return with that sadness we know so well. But I hope you come back happy because you deserve to be happy.

I’m crying inside right now.

I know you are. I’ll be calling regularly because I know you won’t. I miss you.

Miss you too, Hanna promised.

Jo? Merry Christmas.

Hanna sighed. It was Christmas Day, and here she was, alone, on this stony beach, refusing to acknowledge her first Christmas without Matty. Have a glass of mulled wine for me.

I will. Love you. Talk soon.

Fiona ended the call and Hanna clenched the silent phone in her hand. Fiona had been there for her through it all, all the way since high school. Fiona had seen her fall in love, as a naive seventeen-year-old, and had watched her heart slowly break. Not once had Fi ever asked her if Matty was worth it. Fiona had seen the love they shared, and like everyone else she had silently prayed for hope.

Hope had given Hanna and Matty almost ten years together. Hope had been the only thing keeping her going some days. And hope had been what had ultimately brought her to Napier. Hope - for a new start.

The wall she had put up the day Matty died made her doubt she would ever fall in love again, whether with another man or with life itself, but still she let hope linger around her.

Easing down on the stones, laying back and closing her eyes, Hanna took some comfort from the beach beneath her, from being able to feel it, the warmth, the pain. She let the relentless Hawke's Bay sun beat down on her skin, allowing it to begin to dissolve the ice crystals in her blood and start the long thaw on her frozen heart. She could do this, all of it. She could start this new job, start this new life, and find her smile again – with a little help from a lot of the Hawke's Bay’s finest bottles of red wine, of course.

Hope and wine. Two old friends. Because she had never been good at being alone.

JANUARY 8th 2012

I jumped, in case you're wondering why I can’t walk right, and I know you are. I know you’re wondering. Everyone wonders but they never ask, or don’t ask the right way. They see my chair and think my mind doesn’t work. Like my legs don’t. But I’m not slow or anything. I’m just sad. Just broken. So, yeah, I jumped from the roof of a building. High enough to kill myself. I thought it'd been high enough anyway. Failed at that, though, like I fail at everything.

But why?

Why not? A bunch of reasons. But, you know, mainly? Because I wanted to die.

But you're fifteen. I don't understand why?

Maybe one day you’ll get it. I hope you don’t though.

gg102096013

A soft sound roused Hanna before the scream of her alarm was allowed its usual honours. Beams of morning sunlight pushed their way through the half-open Venetian blinds, throwing lines of warmth across her. Warm and cold, light and dark. The blinds were a reminder she was never allowed to be fully bathed, or shrouded, in any one thing.

She mentally brushed away the cobwebs of sleep, clearing the haze with rapid blinks as she turned to gaze out the window. Her first meeting with Fiona was on her mind. The dream, a little off in its retelling, had the basic details correct even after all these years. Hanna had properly met her best friend in art class at high school when both were fifteen. After a few months of sharing supplies and niceties, Fiona had hit her with a truth so incomprehensible it had taken Hanna damn near a decade to fully understand it. Fiona was one of the few people who understood the darkness that could consume a person, and Hanna needed Fiona now. Hanna had been so determined to walk away and make it on her own somewhere new that she had never once stopped to ask herself if she was capable of it. Alone, in this strange city, in a bedroom that didn’t yet feel like her own, Hanna had never felt less capable in her life.

At least she was wearing summer pyjamas beneath the sheets, something she considered a step in the right direction. She hadn’t altered the angle of the blinds before falling into bed late last night. She had only slipped out of her clothes because something deep in the dark recesses of her mind told her that sleeping in her jeans and shirt would be a new low. It would be the proof everyone was looking for, evidence that showed them all she couldn't function without her support circle. But she did need that support. Every day was a battle not to run back to Auckland and shatter into a mess at her best friend’s feet, splintering until she was nothing but a broken pile of shards of her former self.

Hanna sat up on the thin sheets. The blankets lay bunched at the end of the bed from the previous night’s heat. She sighed in frustration at the weather. It rained in Napier? She thought she had left that behind in Auckland. What was that old song? About the weather following you, or something? Matty had never been bothered by a bit of rain, had never let it dampen his spirits, while she had never been as positive about it.

So, we can’t go to the beach? Matty had shrugged, unfazed by the sight that had greeted them out their central city apartment window, the single, long plane of glass in the shoebox they called home. Let’s get in the car and road trip the hell out of this weekend. The sun is shining somewhere, Joey.

Northland. The Coromandel. Gisborne. They had found the sunshine on many occasions. Rain had never stopped Matty finding golden sands, azure waves, and cloudless skies. 

Staring out the window, she shifted her gaze until her eyes met those of her reflection’s. Tears streamed down her cheeks, leaving fat wet trails that stained her skin. She touched the tips of two fingers to her face, only to find it dry, the tears nothing more than the rain sliding down the outside of the window. Rain was falling around her in January in a city with a so-called Mediterranean climate and she couldn’t leave. Without her car she was forced to rely on public transport, and even if she could get away who would she take with her? No one. There was no one. She had no one.

Matty would always go to where the blue skies and warm sun seemed eternal.

Without you, the rain is determined to follow me, Hanna murmured into the empty room.

Her heart twisted in her chest, aching with a hollowness she might never fill again. She was drowning in the deluge of her loss; to break the surface, to breathe again, all seemed like impossible goals.

Pushing against her protesting muscles until she was sitting up on the edge of her second-hand bed, Hanna surveyed her surroundings. It wasn’t home, and it might never be, but maybe that was okay. Her new home was bare, her bedroom just a bed and nightstand, atop which sat one lone lamp that released the dullest of light. Furnishings could come later, perhaps even a stronger light bulb, if she stayed. She had been lucky to find a two-bedroom home for rent in her price range, ten kilometres away from the beach she had sat on, alone, on Christmas Day. It wasn’t ideal, but it was a start, which was all she needed right now, and those words had become a mantra, repeating in her head as she had signed the lease.

Hanna hadn’t owned a car her last year in Auckland, preferring to ride the public transportation system over navigating the busy highways herself. Sitting on the buses and trains had allowed her time to get lost in her head before and after work. The small Suzuki she had shared with Matty had been sold soon after his death, holding too many memories, and the back seat holding more DNA than she would ever care to admit to. After his death, she had felt fear grip her each time she had been forced to look in the rear-view mirror, afraid of catching sight of his ghost, of seeing a cold, white skeletal finger beckoning her back to join him. The Suzuki, with the phantom of their relationship in the back-seat, and all the memories the small red car had evoked, had all needed to go.

Now, she supposed, she might need to purchase one. Living so far out of the main hub, in a city with a public transportation system that stopped before six p.m., and barely existed at all on the weekends, drove her to accept it might be time to get behind the wheel again.

She yawned, her jaw cracking from the effort, and stumbled out of bed with limbs lacking grace and coordination. Matty's ghost was surely smirking at her as she righted herself just moments before hitting the floor. Coffee. She needed coffee. Not the instant stuff currently residing in her sparse pantry, but the warm aromas of a coffee shop, the exotic tastes of different roasts, something with frothed milk that took time to make.

Despite the rain there was a warmth in the air. Hanna threw on a pair of worn-in blue jeans, and a black t-shirt, completing the untidy outfit with a black cardigan and a pair of black sneakers. Didn’t she used to have colour in her wardrobe? Didn’t she used to have colour in her life?

It was Sunday, a lazy day, when the gentle ticking of the clock seemed languid, and her own pace became a little slower - because of Matty. Matty had never allowed her to rush a Sunday.

"It's the last day before the working week kicks off, so enjoy it, Joey."

Even now she could hear him in her head, reminding her that tomorrow she would be back in her business outfits, tomorrow she would be her usual put-together self, but today was for finding comfort in uncomfortable surroundings.

Pulling her shoulder-length auburn curls into a ponytail, she splashed some water on her bare face, grabbed her bag and headed out the door. No one knew her here. She didn’t have anyone to impress. She could be lazy and not give a damn who she ran into. Fiona would have fussed over her if she could see her now. Her best friend would have forced her into the shower, picked an outfit for her, handed her the mascara wand while holding the lip gloss ready in her other hand, watching her through concerned eyes that absorbed way too much. Fiona would have been worrying about her lack of energy.

But it's a Sunday, she silently told the version of her friend who still lingered in her head after the dream. Still nothing could silence her brain from using the more sinister d word. Nothing could stop it from reverberating inside her head, bouncing around inside her skull until she acknowledged its existence.

I'm not depressed, she told her reflection through clenched teeth. Shut up, Fi, she muttered to a friend that wasn’t there, before turning away from the mirror, grabbing her bag in a tightly clenched fist, and leaving her house.

Hanna made her way down the tree-lined streets, still shaking off her frustrations and reminding herself to just slow her pace down, all the way to the bus stop she had discovered the previous day. Groaning as she read the bus schedule, she remembered then: No bus service on a Sunday on this street. The nearest bus stop on a busy road wasn't nearby at all. She wasn’t in Auckland anymore, but she could adapt. God knew she had done it enough times in the past, had changed her ways in order to get through a new challenge. And she could do it now. Even if it was raining, and the buses weren’t running, and she was dressed like she was in mourning, she could adapt.

Taradale, her new home, had a small shopping area, one she had never felt inspired enough to explore before. Perhaps local coffee stores kept hours on Sundays. Perhaps she could get her caffeine fix after all. Perhaps this day could be fixed.

Hanna forced herself to look around as she walked towards the small shopping street. The pretty tree-lined Church Road, with houses reminiscent of Mount Eden, held her attention for a while. She passed a small church as she turned a corner and allowed herself a moment to pause and gaze up at the tall, white, thin steeple. Hanna had never been one for religion, but she had escaped to the sanctuary of various churches during the last weeks of Matty’s life, seeking solace in the peace. While she felt no need to attend a church service this Sunday, it was nice to know the church was there should she ever need it.

She had chosen Taradale for its hills, but, if she was being honest, she could have chosen anywhere in Napier, as littered as the city was with random hills. She liked the look of the ones out here though, the mounds and fortifications. Like Auckland. Perhaps too much.

As she wandered into the shopping street, she was dismayed to find most of the shops yet to open. Cafés and bakeries dark with closed signs still hanging. Clothing stores with large signs announcing they were closed on Sundays. She just needed one place to be open, one place that wasn’t the large fast-food chain looming down on her as she crossed the street. She scanned side streets, desperate for that one sign that would give her what she needed. And then it appeared, near the end of the