THE TROUBLE WITH PAPER PLANES(76)

I couldn’t remember the last time Alex had been to my house.

His face was red, and he’d been crying.

It was too early for a social call.

“You have to come,” he croaked, not bothering to hide it. “Now. She needs you.”

“What? Who?”

“Mum!”

My heart slammed to a halt, hitting the wall of my ribcage. “What’s happened? Is she okay?”

“She needs you,” he said again, wiping the back of his hand across his nose.

If Alex was here, and Bridget was in trouble, it was bad. Really bad. My heart jump-started, rocketing up through my chest and into my throat. I lunged at him, grabbing him by the shirt and shoving him up against the wall of the house.

“What the f*ck did you do!” I hissed, mere centimetres from his face.

I could smell his breath from there, but there was no hint of alcohol on it. Nothing was adding up.

“I didn’t do anything!”

“Bullshit! What’s going on? What happened?” I didn’t even give him a chance to answer, my mind spinning out of control, possibilities raining down on me. “If you’ve hurt her again, I swear to God, I’ll – “

“It’s Pop!”

It felt exactly like he’d punched me in the stomach. Everything drew in on itself. “Henry?”

“He’s dead,” he croaked.

The sound of my own heartbeat was all I could hear, reverberating inside my body, filling up all the cavities and bursting out of them. I felt sick. I wanted to call him a liar, but I could tell from the look on his face that he wasn’t lying.

He was sober and he was telling the truth.

I let him go and he stood there, trying not to cry. I’d never seen him look so vulnerable. Not even when Em disappeared. He kept himself busy then, doing stuff. Then he started drinking and he was still busy. But now, he wasn’t. He wasn’t doing anything, because there was nothing to be done. It was too late.

My knees buckled and I sank down onto the front step. It couldn’t be true. We were just there, we just saw him yesterday.

Maia’s arms encircled me from behind, but I barely felt them. Alex sat down on the step beside me.

“What happened?” I managed to ask, without turning to him. I didn’t seem to be able to move. Breathing was taking up all my energy.

“Mum went around this morning, to drop something off to him on her way in to work,” he sniffed. “He was sitting in his chair in the living room. She thought he was asleep.”

Jesus. He never even made it to bed. How long had he been sitting there? Since we left? Had he been there all night?

“You need to come over. She won’t let me call anyone. She’s just… she’s just sitting there with him. She won’t leave him. I didn’t know what else to do.”

Through the haze of the fog that would eventually become grief, I heard the helplessness in his voice. He was lost. He didn’t know who to turn to. Somewhere in the back of my brain, I knew that it must’ve taken a lot for him to come to me.

“Come on,” Maia murmured in my ear. “Come and get dressed. We need to go over there. Bridget needs you.”

I stood, my knees trembling as if they might not be up to the task. I heard Maia invite Alex inside. He was reluctant, but she insisted, ushering me into the bedroom as she made him wait in the living room. She closed the door behind us and I stood there, in the middle of the room, with no idea of what to do.

“You need to get dressed,” she said gently, opening drawers and pulling out a clean pair of boxers, boardies and a t-shirt and handing them to me. I stared at them blankly.

Clothes. They were clothes, and I had to put them on. But Henry was dead. How was I supposed to just get dressed when Henry was dead?

I looked up at her as the tears finally came. Her face crumpled and she wrapped her arms around me. I wanted to hold her, but my arms wouldn’t move. My body didn’t seem connected to my brain anymore. My brain was busy trying to process information, and any signals it should have been sending to my body were going astray.

Slowly, the signals seemed to find their way, and I reached up to put my arms around her.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered into my shoulder.

I didn’t know what to say to that. I’d never known what to say to that, and people had said it to me often enough over the years.

“Come on,” she said, rubbing my back gently and pulling back to look me in the eye. “Bridget needs you. You need to get dressed.”