The Apple Tart of Hope Read Free Page B

Killealys—Paloma and her mother—were in it. I’d started cyclingover there as often as I could, and hanging around outside his window, right beside the squashed-up cherry tree underneath the space that once belonged to me and Oscar.
    Sometimes we’d look up and see Paloma’s light going on but we didn’t say anything about her. I didn’t care if she thought I was some kind of prowler. I didn’t even want to think about her, though all the time it felt as if she was very close.
    â€œStevie’s fine, thanks, Meggie,” said Bill Dunleavy. “To be honest with you, he’s a lot more cheerful than you might expect. The heartbreaking thing is he keeps telling me that Oscar’s absolutely excellent, that he’s in a safe place, doing really well. Honestly, Meg, it would be almost funny, if the whole thing wasn’t so desperately sad.”
    He laughed a strange kind of a laugh and pulled the back of his hand across his eyes and sniffed a bit.
    â€œI’m trying my best, Meg. I’m trying to stay focused on Stevie because you have to give your energy to the living—it’s what everyone keeps telling me. In fact, Stevie’s the one who spends most of his time reassuring
me
: ‘I’m fine Dad,’ he says. ‘I’m really okay. You don’t have to worry.’ ”
    It was as if Oscar’s dad had forgotten that he was talking to anyone at all, and he began to mutter things then that I wasn’t able to hear. His big shoulders slumped, his binoculars dangled sadly, twirling a little despondent, demented pirouette at the end of their string.
    Part of me felt like telling him to stop his obsessive searching and go home. Stevie could probably have benefited from his only remaining parent being present these days. But another part of me thought that if Oscar’s dad stopped looking, it would be the final turning point of despair, and I wasn’t ready for that.
    As the early days of the search grew into weeks, you could see that the frantic activity stopped being quite so frantic and people beganto shake their heads slightly as they walked away from their daily search, and the panic that had been in everyone’s voices in the early days, well, it started to fade. Panic might feel like a bad thing, but in actual fact, it contains thousands of little splinters of hope. When panic is gone, it usually means that those splinters are gone too. Even Oscar’s dad looked as if he had given up, and he had started to talk about Oscar as though he was definitely dead.
    And so, everyone came to accept the unacceptable. Oscar wasn’t coming back. He hadn’t left any of himself behind, unless you count the bike. And the waterlogged shoes.
    The whole time I kept wishing I’d never gone away on that stupid trip to New Zealand, because I was sure that if I hadn’t, Oscar would be here and I wouldn’t be staring into the dark wondering what the bloody hell had happened, and how things had got so bad that he’d come to make such a terrible, hope-deprived decision.
    It had been practically a whole year before all this that my parents had first mentioned the trip. I’d thought it was a mad idea that they would talk about for a few days and then forget. But quite quickly, their enthusiasm for leaving home got more intense and more detailed and soon they were talking about nothing else. They seemed entirely amazed that I wasn’t doing the same.
    Things started appearing in our house, like huge posters of surfers and dolphins and sheep and sunshine. With massive fanfare, my mother stuck them to the wall of the den,
removing
pictures of mine which, as far as I was concerned, was a perfect metaphor for the way in which this whole New Zealand plan was barging into my life and overwriting the plan I had myself—the one that involved staying where I was.
    Life is hard enough when you’re fourteen. You don’t want to