If Only I Could Tell You

by Hannah Beckerman

There seemed to be such an immeasurable distance between the life she had imagined for herself and the life she had led. How, Audrey thought, do you get to the end of your life and feel as though you’ve barely begun?

There were so many things Audrey would change were she afforded a second chance. But that wasn’t how life worked, she knew that. She’d had her chances and now it was too late.

It was too late to repair so many of the things in her life that had been broken: Edward’s untimely death; the grief they had all suffered; the estrangement between Lily and Jess she had been unable to heal. Audrey no longer knew if she accepted her daughters’ rift as the status quo or was wary of probing too deeply for fear of what she might discover at its root.

He was smiling at her with an affability Audrey found disconcerting though she couldn’t understand why. And then it dawned on her. Ben wanted her to do well. He was quietly urging her to succeed. And hard as she tried to remember as she waited for her cue to begin, Audrey couldn’t recall the last time anyone had encouraged her to do well at anything.

She forgot her cancer and the clock ticking loudly in her ears and the deep ruptures in her family. For the first time in years, Audrey managed not to think about her guilt and her disappointments and her catalogue of losses. She sang and all that existed was her and the music and the flood of memories that would forever be associated with that song.

The smell clings to the hairs in Jess’s nose, a smell of counterfeit healthiness. Jess knows it to be a sham. There is no healthiness here. This is where people come when they are really sick. This is where some people come to die.

She blinked and swallowed, trying to re-teach herself the simple task of breathing in and then out again. Such minor victories over her body: controlling her breathing, holding back her tears. Such small battles won when they all knew she’d already lost the war.

He is not maverick or spontaneous in the way that Audrey’s friends’ boyfriends usually are. But then, those boys always break girls’ hearts. And one thing Audrey is sure of is that Edward would never break anyone’s heart.

She thought about her mum, just a few minutes earlier, sitting on the sofa holding her hand, and suddenly found herself imagining the gaping absence her death would leave behind. It was as though something was pressing down hard on her windpipe: an assault, a compression, panic inhaled with each breath. She was forty-three years old, she told herself. She must have known this day would come eventually, that there would likely be years – decades – when she would be alive and her mum would not. She knew that most children, at some point, became orphans.

Mia and Phoebe should not have to suffer for their mothers’ mistakes. Children should not be punished for the sins of their parents.

Happy. Audrey repeated the word in her head, wondering if there were as many definitions of it as there were people on the planet.

An image flashed in her mind of Daniel strolling through Central Park, takeout coffee in one hand and phone in the other, reading her latest email and not finding time to respond.

And beyond Zoe’s absence are the concentric circles of loss that ripple out from that kernel of grief: the adults Jess no longer trusts for their failure to prevent so heinous a crime; the friends and boyfriends she rejects for fear that intimacy may lead to disclosure; the family from whom she is estranged. It is knowledge that isolates Jess from the rest of the world, like a patient in quarantine who fears infecting others with the truth.

I’ve spent my whole life trying to be what you want me to be. I’ve never got into trouble, I’ve always got straight As, I’ve never set a foot wrong because it felt like you only loved me when I was doing everything right—

Cancer was like that, she’d discovered. It turned you into someone in a permanent state of negotiation, bargaining with the intruder inside your body. Audrey would find herself offering deals to it, anticipating their rejection, proposing new terms. But cancer was an unreliable business partner, constantly making ever greater demands for less favourable returns.

Pulling at the soggy tissue between her fingers, she knew that a part of her would always wish things could have been different. She would always wish that she had been told about the severity of Zoe’s illness and that she’d known the truth about her death. But most of all Jess wished, very simply, that Zoe had never got ill. And that was a wish, she admitted to herself for the first time, that hadn’t been in anyone’s control: not hers, not her mum’s, not Lily’s or their dad’s. Not the doctors’ or nurses’ who had tried so valiantly to cure Zoe. Jess realised that she had spent all these years being angry with Lily because it was easier to feel anger than it was to feel grief.

Because she was certain now that a person’s story didn’t follow a straight narrative trajectory from birth to death. There were countless beginnings and endings, countless opportunities to start again. There were as many different beginnings to a life as someone was brave and kind enough to allow themselves.