Yesterday I was fishing.
They would have driven back in total silence if Rob had been able to stand it. As it was he put the radio on while he drove, full concentration on the road. Bella fell asleep, as she usually did in the car. Sandra and Mia seemed occupied with their phones at various points, or with whatever happened to be passing outside the window. Unloading the car and walking up to the flat, the silence between them became oppressive once again.
"Right," he dropped his keys on the table. "Mia why don't you and Sandra take Bella out for a walk; get some fresh air. Get some fish and chips for tea," he rummaged in his pocket, pulled out a ten pound note and handed it to them.
Sandra looked at her watch, it was only half past four. "What about you?" she asked.
"I'm not hungry," he said simply not looking at her.
She looked at Mia, who lowered her eyes to the floor and swallowed. "Dad…"
"I need to ring your mother," he managed to state. He couldn't turn around and look at any of them. The first thing to do was to ring his ex-wife. He didn't blame Mia for not telling him. He didn't blame Rufus. He needed to ring the one person who he could apportion at least some of the blame to.
"Come on," Sandra said quietly. She pulled the pushchair out from where it stood by the coat rack and brushed a few stray particles of dust from the seat. Taking the cot from Mia, she unclipped Bella and transferred the baby from one chariot to another.
"Dad…" Mia began again.
Rob turned around. "Come here," he whispered, opening his arms to her; she responded by covering the ground between them as if the few feet were mere millimetres. He held her close as he tried to steady his breath. "I'm sorry," he murmured. "I'm so sorry."
"It's not your fault," she whispered back, leaning against him. "It's ok."
He nodded as he released her and watched her take the handles of the pushchair and manoeuvre it out of the front door. He nodded as Sandra placed a warm and steady hand on his upper arm for a moment before she followed his daughter back outside. It was not ok.
Hearing the door close behind them, he plucked his phone from his jacket pocket before shrugging the coat off and hanging it up. He went into the kitchenette and poured himself a glass of orange juice. Then, settling himself calmly on the sofa, he scrolled through his contacts list until he found her name.
A man's voice holding just a tint of an American accent cheerfully answered, "Helen's phone?"
"Hi, is Helen there please?" Rob failed to achieve the same enthusiasm as his counterpart, but at least didn't sound quite like the grumpy bear he felt like; the dragon could be tamed again. "Yes, it's Robert."
He pulled at the laces on his shoes while the man obliged by finding the woman Rob needed to speak to. As her voice met his ear, he realised he didn't even know where to begin.
"He'll be alright, you know," Mia said quietly as they walked along; heading up the street.
"Shouldn't it be me telling you that?" Sandra asked gently.
Mia looked at her and smiled. "Maybe."
They turned the corner and entered the park behind the supermarket. Mia sighed and stopped at the bench. She checked that Bella was happily looking about her surroundings before sitting down.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Sandra asked as she sat beside the girl. It felt strange not to be in a professional capacity; though thankfully she had only spent a brief spell working rape cases. It was a feeling of not knowing; not knowing how best to be supportive of the girl she had quickly come to love as a daughter. Should she want to demand to know the details, track down the boy's parents and string them up from the nearest tall obstruction? Part of her felt like that, and she knew that Robert shared those feelings. Should she want to request an exhumation so that the boy who had caused the harm could be post-humorously hanged drawn and quartered like he deserved? Because he definitely deserved it. All she wanted to do was to take Mia in her arms and promise her that nothing bad would ever happen to her again. But that would be a falsehood; a promise that would inevitably be broken through no fault of either of theirs. It was strange; all she wanted… was to know what to do.
Mia shook her head slightly as she lifted it so that she could watch the clouds. "I did love Daniel," she said quietly after a time. "I know that sounds silly. It's always love when you're fifteen, isn't it?"
"Where did you hear that?" Sandra smiled.
Mia looked at her and shrugged. "My mother screamed it at me when I tried to explain the … everything. Rufus is a lot like her. They think a lot, then they scream and shout like toddlers. The whole world is their world. If something happens to interfere with that, hell to it. Me and Dad, we're different. We fall in love," she sighed. "And we don't always know the right words, because we don't think it through. But we know what we feel. Mum and Rufus, they know what they think."
She leant forward and pulled the brown toy rabbit from the bag hung over the pushchair handles, offering it to Bella as she started to mumble.
"Digger Thomas was bad news," she continued. "Always was."
Sandra let the silence grow comfortably between them. She looked around the park: there was a man throwing a ball for his dog, which the dog happily bounded after and picked up, returning to the man to throw again; there was a middle-aged couple walking arm-in-arm, carrying on some private conversation oblivious to the rest of the world; there was an old man playing football with his grandson while his daughter watched. At the swings there was a mother and daughter pushing a young girl on a swing. It was like a park full of mirror-images of her own family. She turned her eyes back towards the reality of companions to find Mia's searching for hers. She lifted her arm and wrapped it around the girl as she leant into the hug. Biting her lip as Mia sniffed, it didn't feel strange anymore.
By the time they returned to the flat, fish and chips wrapped and bagged for the three of them, Robert was sulking in the dark. The dragon had reared, been attacked by a banshee and retreated to its lair to lick its wounds. Helen was moving to the States; she was taking Rufus; she didn't believe that Mia had been telling the truth; and she was a bitch. The only good thing that he could take comfort in was that she was his ex-wife. Emphasis on the ex. He barely looked up as the sounds of his family returning entered the flat. He did, however, register the lights being turned on and the smell of salt and vinegar assaulting his senses. Suddenly, he was ravenous. Feeding the dragon always helped.
"I know you said you weren't hungry," said the voice attached to the hand that warmly touched his shoulder. "But we thought a few chips wouldn't hurt."
He looked up into the loving oceanic eyes of the woman who had accepted him into her life, past and future mistakes forgiven and nodded. "Thank you."
She wouldn't ask if he was ok. She wouldn't press him to reveal the highlights of his afternoon. She would be there for him, when he was ready, as she had for his daughter. Mia's tears, long since dried, would remain scored in her heart until she was old and grey. The anguish and guilt she read in Robert's face would haunt her memories until the day she died. Every event which touches those close to us is a part of our own history, she thought to herself as she pulled three plates out of the cupboard and warmed them in the microwave. Every moment of coincidence in our lives, leads to the moment in which we're living. They weren't words that she remembered reading in any book or hearing in any film, not verbatim; through her own eyes she saw the reality of a thousand clichés coming true and mutating into the philosophical chain of thought that persisted as they ate.
"I'm going to put Bella to bed," Mia stood up from the table. "Then I've got some homework to print out."
"Ok," Sandra smiled. "Leave your plate, I'll do them."
Robert watched as the highly regarded; highly driven; and formally phenomenally private Sandra Pullman took the dirty dinner plates from the table, washed them, dried them and put them away. In his kitchen! It was like a very topsy turvy dream where the improbably was simply life. He ran a hand over the top of his head and scratched at his greying hair. He allowed himself to smile at the subtle minutiae of life: he was going grey; Sandra was in his kitchen; yesterday he'd been fishing and making awkward conversation with Gerry Standing and Brian Lane. Steve was spending the weekend in Scotland. He'd lost a bet and had to buy the first round. What he wouldn't give to be reliving yesterday instead of reeling from today. Though that he knew was the real fantasy; reality was the impossible; and that was what he had to deal with.
"Penny?" she asked shyly. It wasn't an expression she used, but he did. He had the other day; when she had needed him. Now it was the other way around.
"I'm not sure I have any change," he looked up. She was leaning against the breakfast bar, studying him with a worried expression.
"I have," she smiled softly.
"You have," he responded thoughtfully, running his thumb along the underside of his jaw line where he could feel the beard he would shave tomorrow forming. "Sandra, I don't even know where to start."
"How did it go with Helen on the phone?" she crossed her arms and relaxed against the solid bar.
He snorted. "You know I can't believe I spent nearly ten years of my life with that woman."
"Well, then," she offered as a qualification.
He sighed. "She's got some top executive job at a firm with offices in New York. That's why they're moving. His family is from there."
She acknowledged silently; he had told them shortly what Rufus had said before switching on the radio in the car. She waited patiently as she watched him gather his thoughts, discarding the least savoury and least relevant in order to form the sentences that he needed to speak.
"Yesterday," he frowned at the table-top. "I was fishing. I was so nervous about making conversation with Gerry and Brian; but it was so easy. We talked about fishing. And we just … fished. Then we went to the pub. Meeting your family was so much easier. We meet mine … and everything just goes wrong."
A warm feeling carried her through his next pause as she appreciated his reference to her boys as her family.
"When Mia showed up on my doorstep, soaked through with rain, pregnant, desperate… I was just so angry with Helen for abandoning her. And I believed, I let myself believe, that it was all some stupid, drunken mistake. My daughter isn't stupid," he looked straight ahead and found Sandra's eyes softly meeting his. "She isn't stupid. Yet I let myself believe it, because I was just so happy to have her back."
In her peripheral sight, Sandra was aware that the door to Mia and Bella's room was open, though she kept an even gaze with Rob.
"And for a moment, a horrible moment today I thought that my beautiful granddaughter, the baby I hold and love everyday, who giggles at the sound of my voice… to think that she could be in my life because of something so horrible… but then it was worse," his voice lowered. "How could anyone…? She was fifteen!"
Sandra took a breath as he faltered. "She was so young," she said steadily. "She still is. But she loved Bella's father. And she lost him. She's been through so many nightmares. But I know how proud you are of her and Bella, and you should be."
"How could I have been so selfish?" his eyes narrowed as he interrupted what she might have been about to say next. He stood up suddenly from the table and slammed his palms on the solid surface, hoping that the tactile stability of the object would help to prevent the tears that so desperately wanted to fall from his eyes. "Why didn't I ask her about what had happened? Why she'd left school? All those little details, those little questions… Why didn't I ask? Everything she went through, and I didn't even know! What kind of father does that make me? Why didn't I ask?"
"Because it wasn't what I needed," Mia said quietly, stepping into the living room behind them. "Dad, I didn't need you to ask questions. I didn't need to be interrogated. I just needed you to be there, and you were. You were there when I needed somewhere to stay; someone to stay with. You were there when Bella was born and you've been there every day since. You never asked what you didn't need to ask. And I'm sorry I didn't tell you. But I didn't know how to. I'd dealt with what happened, in so much that raking it up again wouldn't have been good for either of us."
Rob swallowed as he walked toward his daughter. There was so much he needed to say to her, but he didn't have the first clue about what those things might be.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
She smiled. "I'm not," she replied.
"I love you," he blinked.
"I love you too," she fell into her father's embrace. It was a hug that held all the emotion of their doorstep reunion all those months ago. It was a hug that meant that everything was ok.
Later, as the three of them sat on the sofa watching the late night film, Rob in the centre with an arm around each of his 'girls' as they sat curled comfortably on either side of him, a wry laugh broke from his lips.
"Mmm?" Mia mumbled, stirring slightly from a half-beginning doze.
"What is it?" Sandra asked, glancing up at him.
"Just," he grinned at the simplicity of the source of his amusement. "After everything that's happened, I keep coming back to one thought."
"What's that?" Mia stretched sleepily.
"Yesterday," he kissed her temple. "I was fishing."