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I walked around Byron Bay after saying goodbye to my brother and bought some organic fruit. Then I called Oliver on my way home. We’d talked the day before, but he had to hang up right away after just a few words because someone told him he had a meeting.
“How’s it going?” he asked me.
“I’ve got some more questions.”
“I’m all ears,” he replied.
“Leah spends the whole day shut up in her room.”
“I told you, she needs her space.”
“Can I take that space away from her?”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“What are you trying to tell me, Axel?”
“You never asked her to just stop locking herself away?”
“No, that’s not how it works, the psychologist told us…”
“Do I have to go along with all that?” I asked.
“Yes. It’s a matter of time. She’s had a hard time.”
I held back the impulse to contradict him and bit my tongue. Then he talked to me about his work out there, the organizational stuff he’d been doing for those three weeks. If he was lucky, maybe he’d be able to cut his stay in Sydney a few months short. I didn’t want to let myself feel relieved before I knew for sure.
* * *
It was Saturday. She’d spent the whole morning shut away, and it was starting to try my patience, even though Oliver would arrive on Monday and I would have my normality back for seven days. It’s not that I didn’t understand her––of course I understood her pain––but that didn’t change things, didn’t change the present. According to the psychologist Oliver had taken her for numerous sessions with, she wasn’t working her way through the phases of grief properly. In theory, she was stuck in the first, denial but I didn’t agree with all that. Maybe that’s why I knocked on her door.
Leah looked up and took off her headphones.
“The waves are nice; grab your board.”
She blinked, confused. That was when I realized that every time I proposed something to her, it came across as a question. A question Leah felt justified in saying no to. But this wasn’t a question.
“I’m not in the mood. Thanks though.”
“Don’t give me that. Move your ass.”
She looked at me with alarm. I saw her chest rising and falling in time to her accelerated breathing, as if she hadn’t seen the attack coming after all those days of calm. I hadn’t planned it either, and I had promised my best friend I wouldn’t do something like this, but I trusted my instincts. And I had an instinctive need to get her out of that room, a desire to drag her away from that place. Leah sat up stiffly, tense.
“I don’t want to go, Axel.”
“I’ll wait for you outside.”
I lay in the hammock stretched between two beams on the porch, where I normally read at night or closed my eyes while I listened to music. I waited. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty. Twenty-five. After half an hour, she appeared, nose wrinkled with distaste, hair in a ponytail, face uncomprehending.
“Why do you want me to go?”
“Why do you want to stay?”
“I don’t know,” she answered softly.
“Me neither. Let’s go.”
Leah followed me in silence and we crossed the short distance separating us from the beach. The white sand received us warmly under the midday sun, and she took off her dress and stood there in her bikini. I don’t know why, but I looked away and stared at the surfboard before passing it to her.
