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The first night she wakes up screaming, cold sweat clinging to her amidst the tangled sheets around her ankles, Amy is almost relieved Poppy isn’t home. Heartbreaking, that.
There is a thing they don’t tell you about leaving yourself open to attachment. They warn that it is a learning curve, certainly – if they are kind enough to – and that it takes time to learn to be someone’s someone. To be a partner, a mother, to love and be loved.
They never tell you that it is impossible to unlearn it. Once you’ve done it, the muscle memory is carved into your bones. You never forget.
Your body keeps score. It records each moment in indelible ink.
Your mind and self grow to shape themselves around the people who become part of you, and you are not just you. Never again alone.
Funny thing, that. Loneliness.
Amy can feel the gaping hole in her life, her mind, her body, exactly where Iain and Poppy used to be. She cannot do anything but feel it, every second of every day. They – not really them, but losing them – are in each blink, each breath, each step she takes. She can stop walking, she can almost stop blinking, but she cannot stop breathing.
She wakes up screaming, cold sweat clinging to her skin as the bamboo sheets Iain loved are lashed around her ankles, and she bolts upright to lurch towards Poppy’s room to comfort her. It takes more than a handful of moments before she remembers red taillights and January rain, and the feeling of the tarmac under her knees as her legs gave way under her the moment the car turned out of sight.
After spending the better part of half a decade learning how to be Poppy’s other parent, Amy doesn’t know what will hurt more – forgetting what that feels like, or always remembering, never being .
She resents herself. Her stubbornness, her pride, her fear over not being enough. She resents herself for waiting so long to say yes to Iain’s proposal that she’s lost him and his daughter – because she has no legal claim to Poppy, no matter what the seven-year-old calls her or how much she lives for the child – in one fell swoop.
Iain’s parents hadn’t waited for the funeral. They’d taken Poppy the night before, just two days after they’d both gotten out of the hospital. His mother – Morag – had flatly refused Amy’s help planning the funeral. Poppy had burrowed into her side through the whole service, but Morag had tugged her away once people started leaving the gravesite.
Amy could barely stand, for the guilt of resurfacing from the frigid water empty handed the second time around and the utter helplessness she felt in the face of losing Poppy as well. She folded, spent from the days spent trying to fight for her right to raise her daughter in all but writing. Just like that, again, Poppy was gone. Alone by the polished gravestone Iain would have abhorred, it was everything Amy could do not to scream herself hoarse.
By the time she dragged herself home from the funeral, alone and chilled to the bone, she was so exhausted she put the kettle on and got three mugs out of the cupboard with the teabags and hot chocolate mix as it boiled. She’d chucked a teabag each into two of the mugs, and had a teaspoon half buried in the mix when she realised, and nearly knocked the tin to the ground as an emotion she could hardly name bubbled up and nearly boiled over.
She hoped Poppy would be happy, with her grandparents. If there was one thing she never wanted to forget amidst the spare cups and too much space and memories that seeped out of every floorboard in this flat, it was that the only thing that mattered was Poppy’s happiness. She could live with the rest.
She’d put herself to sleep without the tea, the kettle moved off the heat and forgotten, long tepid. Then she’d woken up screaming.
It is unmistakable. The absence .
The space on the bed where Iain used to sleep, the indent still branded into the mattress. Poppy’s giggles ringing off the walls, even as she lies in bed nearly an hour away. The gaps in the closet where his clothes used to be, and the empty, gutted room that used to house a growing girl.
Amy’s arms, so used to wrapping themselves around Iain’s broad torso, or Poppy’s diminutive frame. Crockery for three. Ingredients for three. A flat so big for one person Amy positively rattles around in it.
A life in past tense.
She wakes up screaming, the cold sweat on her limbs and neck feeling too nauseatingly close to frigid, brackish water for her to breathe. Jumping into the shower, Amy scrubs her skin raw before putting on her running clothes, lacing up her trainers, and running until her heart thrums hard enough in her ears to drown the memory of Poppy’s sobs as she dived back in out of her mind.
She heads into work after that, no heed paid to the fact that the sun has yet to rise. By the time it does she’s six files in, the backlog from her brief leave of absence beginning to clear, and she hasn’t even reached for her first coffee yet.
Thus begins the only way she can keep hold on her sanity while her body and mind remember too much for her to take – endless hours at the office, pouring every ounce of herself into each case so there’s nothing left to ache or dream or fret when she inevitably returns to an empty flat.
If she works herself to the bone, she has a shot at sleeping four hours instead of seeing the outline of the car disappear into the depths of muddy water as her eyes sting, over and over and over again until she screams herself hoarse.
If she works herself to the bone it becomes self-explanatory why the DI who’d been for so long the warm, maternal mentor to the juniors of the team has become a withdrawn recluse, the pale pastels of her jumpers faded into sombre blues and greys.
If she works herself to the bone, Robertson promotes her to DCI rather than benches her. At least that’s something to live for.
The aching spaces in her mind, her body, her life – they’re still there. There are too many small things that remind her of small things that clatter and echo into things that grow larger than life or death in her dreams. She sees a toy Poppy used to beg for in the corner of a house they’re in for door-to-doors. Some new DC or another has the same inane coffee order that Iain had when they first met, and she’s never forgotten the smell. A little girl laughs, and runs, and crashes into the back of her knees while she’s getting briefed by the DS on-site, just outside the cordon line of a new crime scene, and her mind plays an endless loop of Poppy, joyous and growing and so close Amy can nearly touch her.
She drives down Morag and Gordon’s way, more times than she is let in. She knows they love Poppy. She just hopes they also want Poppy’s happiness above all.
She keeps the peace, she bides her time, and she remembers. Goodness, she remembers . Poppy has been the centre of her world since she could barely walk, stumbling clumsily into the back of Amy’s legs as she paused in the park at the end of a run one afternoon, Iain closely following. A little distance and a lot of heartache has hardly changed that.
In the dim glow of the lamp she’s set by Iain’s side of the bed since the flat has emptied, Amy stares at the ceiling. She lets herself feel the sting of wondering if she’ll ever put up the luminescent stars she promised Poppy, if she’ll ever have reason to.
She thinks she may only have the energy to patch up one of these gaping chasms in her chest. Either she can learn to love Poppy from further away, with a smaller role in her life, or she can heal from the ache and the gnawing guilt of letting her partner sink, still trapped in their car, beyond her reach. She owes it to Poppy, Amy figures, to serve the living rather than the dead.
The choice is a simple one.
The harm it causes is less so. She never quite expected to find it in herself to love and be loved again, after all. Not when she hadn’t forgotten that it was her distraction, her poor timing, that got Iain killed, and her indecision and hesitance that got Poppy taken from her. Not when she’d expended so much of herself to heal on Poppy’s account, and neglected to heal on Iain’s. Not when red hair as bright as the sun, a smile as blinding as the yellow of the jumper she’d nearly drowned in, and a voice sweeter than honey barrels into her life when she isn’t paying attention, and worms its way in with a slanted smile and a subpar cup of break room hot chocolate before she can say anything to the contrary.
If she holds the still-shattered and barely healed parts of herself far enough apart, she can pretend to be a whole person on either end of the precarious balance beam, or so she thinks, until it all shatters at her feet.