It’s a new moon when he finds Luke staggering across the parking lot of the crappy bar she’d loved so much.
James notices it, because the lack of natural light hinders his efforts to navigate the two of them to the nearest bench so that his friend doesn’t hurl or faceplant on the concrete.
“You idiot.”
Luke takes a deep breath and squeezes his eyes tightly shut. “I didn’t ask you to come.”
He doesn’t answer that, instead prying the phone out of the other man’s pocket as it starts to ring. He turns it toward him questioningly.
“It’s the new nanny,” Luke groans. “Let me –” He clumsily grabs for the phone, and James swiftly steps away.
“I’ve got it.” He talks to the woman and hangs up, turning back to watch Luke clutch the armrest for balance as it starts to rain. “Come on, we’re leaving.”
__
Six years earlier
It’s a typically mundane Tuesday, and they’re sitting in the 8 a.m. Design Studio class Anna made him enroll in with her. He’s propping his head up with one hand and idly sketching with another until her sudden gasp makes him jump.
“What?” James demands grumpily, casting her a scowl.
“Thats him – that boy I was telling you about.” She answers him without looking, as though unable to take her eyes off the dark-haired boy stationed near the door.
“Huh.” He returns to his sketch, until she yanks it out of his hands. “Anna!”
“I didn’t tell you this yet, but I ran into him this weekend and he wants to see me again!”
“How wonderful. He looks like a real winner. Can I have my paper back?”
She gives it back, beaming, and he marvels at how a person can be quite so cheerful at this hour, in this class. But then, she’s been like that since they were little.
Anna manages to focus for the next few minutes, and James takes the time to inspect her target. He’s never been particularly keen on commenting on Anna’s love life – she’s like a sister, and it’s not his business – but he can privately admit he hasn’t been thrilled at the last few guys.
Luke, as he faintly remembers her telling him, sports a wrinkled button-down and chinos, and looks for all the world like nothing interests him more than the design he’s bent over.
Absolutely harmless, he decides, and doesn’t think anything more of it.
James runs into the two of them together later that week, when his spirits are far improved, and Anna eagerly pulls him over before departing to the bathroom.
“So…” Luke starts awkwardly. “Are you two…” He shifts his eyes from James to Anna’s retreating back. “Jesus, no. We grew up together.”
Silence reigns until Anna returns.
Despite the rockiness of their first introduction, time – and Anna’s insistence – allows their initial wariness to twist itself into something resembling friendship, and then into close friendship. And so it was, two days before graduation, that James found himself the first one Luke approached to declare his intention of marrying Anna.
James remembers that he had clapped him on the back, bought the next round, and informed him that no, he would not subtly ask Anna which cut of diamond she would prefer, because no one could attain such information inconspicuously, and he’s a man, thank you very much.
He remembers he left Luke to ponder, and went off to a date that he didn’t have high hopes for, and came out of it cursing himself for his pessimism with a stupid smile on his face.
Her name was Amelia, and he skipped home afterwards thinking, I’m going to marry that girl, and screw the cliche of it all because he’d never been more sure of anything.
Looking back, it was a cruel coincidence that he met her on that specific night – that he would discover the light and joy of his existence in the same rise and set of sun that Luke started planning a shared future with Anna that would never happen.
They were all so blissfully unaware, and so happy.
___
Their wedding is beautiful. The couple moves to London for Luke’s job, and returns to visit when James and Amelia tie the knot themselves a year later.
They make a lot of phone calls those next few years, the four of them. They all tend to blur together in James’ mind when he thinks back, those quick updates on the way to work, bids for advice, scheduling for visits – but there’s a couple he’ll remember forever.
He remembers their voices on speakerphone, asking them to be the godparents to their new son Oliver, and Amelia’s smile, and his own leaping heart.
He remembers a slow afternoon, lying on the couch and fumbling for his ringing phone, seeing Lulke’s caller ID, and raising the phone to his ear, and hearing an unfamiliar man on the other line say he was Luke’s brother, he was in the hospital, come now. He remembers the numbness, the encroaching desperation as more and more terrible details spilled from the phone, the thought that this must be a nightmare, because how, simply how, could something like this happen?
___
James paces the hospital for a long time.
Apparently Luke’s brother is a bastard, because he booked it as soon as James showed up, leaving him alone to plan the funeral with Luke unable to, lying shivering and silent beneath the clinical white sheets. He’s been conscious now for two days without saying anything. The accident didn’t cause any permanent damage, the doctors say – so James thinks he’s simply drowning in the incomprehensibility that Anna is gone.
Amelia tries to coax Luke to talk, to eat a real meal, but it’s pointless, so she sits at his bedside instead as James begins making the phone calls, walking through the halls as he does it because the movement seems to ease some of the plunging emptiness in his stomach and the random spouts of panicked gasps. He’s unable to reconcile the truth that Anna is dead. He’s known her his entire life; knowing her is like an instinct… She’s meant to be a phone call away at any instant.
Instead, he calls the host of people who knew her to inform them of her passing, repeating the lines like a script; over and over again – he’s an actor with a series of bad takes and he won’t ever get it right because he can’t understand what the director wants from him.
Anna’s parents have been dead for years, so he calls Luke’s instead, to come pick up their grandson from the neighbors house he’s been staying at, and he sends Amelia to meet them and explain this catastrophe. He calls to ask about her body, he arranges a closed-casket ceremony. He calls a lawyer to talk about the mangled car and the drunk driver, and goes to splash his face with water after that, and nearly collapses with relief when Amelia returns.
Luke’s mother shows up the next day to stay with him in the hospital, thanking James profusely for his help with tears in her eyes, and as he weakly nods he realizes with a pang that he’s forgotten one crucial call.
His own mother starts crying on the phone at him, because Anna was like her daughter, and James faintly hears himself tell her it’s okay, it’ll be okay, I’m taking care of it, until Amelia eases the device out of his hands and takes it somewhere else.
___
James stands in front of Luke’s bed, forcing himself to meet the other man’s shattered eyes.
“Are you in any pain?” James knows it’s a ridiculous question as soon as he asks it. Luke scoffs. “Alright.” He turns to go.
“Wait.” James looks back with shock. It’s the first time Luke’s spoken to him. “Oliver. Can he come?”
“Of course,” James says, struggling to keep the pity off his face. “Anything you need.”
He calls Luke’s parents and tells them to bring Oliver for a visit. It’s a really good idea; he should have thought of it sooner. Luke shouldn’t see his son for the first time at Anna’s funeral.
There’s a memorial service after the funeral, a series of well-wishers crowded into Luke’s parents home with dishes of food and memories. He swallows down the ache as people ask how he knew Anna, offer their condolences, press cards and flowers into his hands to give to Luke later, because he’s locked himself in a bedroom upstairs, unable to stand it all.
She was such a beautiful person, everyone says, and they all stand there and list all the reasons why that’s so, all the amazing things she did and ways she was that she can’t do anymore and won’t be ever again, as Oliver begins to cry in his grandfather’s arms and the sky dims and guests begin to file out.
Amelia sets a gentle hand on his arm as the last people leave. “You need to get some sleep.” They say their goodbyes to Luke’s parents, and he hugs his godson tightly, staring past his little head at the photograph tucked on the mantle between two vases, Luke and Anna swinging Oliver between them in the streets of Paris, frozen in eternal laughter.
He lets Anna guide him to the car.
__
It takes four months of Luke not returning his calls for James to decide enough is enough and fly to London.
His car isn’t at the house, so James looks instead at the pub Anna would drag them all to whenever he and Amelia visited.
He finds him there, in the parking lot.
__
“Where are we going?” Luke’s face is pressed against the car window, staring into the flanking woods as they drive.
“I booked a hotel room. You can have the bed.”
“What?” He peels his face off the glass. James cast him a sidelong glance, raising his eyebrows. “No. Take me home.”
“You’re not going home like this; you’ll lose another nanny. She agreed to stay the night. You can go back tomorrow.”
He opens his mouth to protest again but seems to think better of it, slumping back into the seat.
James grips the steering wheel tightly, feeling sparks of hot anger begin to encroach on his typical sympathy for the other man. “So, what?” He finally starts, unable to hold his tongue. “You thought if you never called back I would stay away? Think, that’s enough from me, I’ve taken care of Luke enough to fix my guilty conscience and now I’m done?”
Luke doesn’t answer, like always, and James slams on the brakes violently, jerking the car to a halt. “Answer me.”
Luke’s jaw tightens, entire body stiffening as he plasters a fake smile on his face, maybe trying to act mocking but James knows him far too well for that. “I don’t owe you anything.”
And, wow, that stings more than he expected. James would laugh, if he didn’t think the instant he let sound bubble out he would burst into tears like a child. He starts the car moving again, taking harsh inhales, relearning how to breath normally and then –
“That kid only has one parent, and you’re doing a shit job.” It’s the sort of sentence that’s meant to be snapped in anger, but he doesn’t even have the energy for that, just says it tonelessly and tiredly and lets it seep into the silence between them. He continues, mercilessly. “Anna would hate this, this – seeing what you’re doing. It would destroy her.”
It almost hurts to watch Luke’s expression whenever someone mentions her name. There’s a flash of shock, like he’d forgotten that things didn’t use to be like this, that his life was once more than this sorry half-existence. Then a fury, erupting again from that first day after he found out he’d survived the crash and she didn’t, this intense hatred at whatever higher force allowed such a thing, and it shifts, right before an observer’s eyes, into a heart-splitting grief that makes you tired just to look at it.
James wonders what a person sees in his own eyes when he’s forced to think of her, if he possesses the capacity to love so deeply it’s visible.
Luke stares ahead with glassy eyes and watches the road stretch out before them.
And later, when they get to the hotel and James is yanking off his raincoat and watching Luke blink raindrops that could be tears from his eyes, his old friend turns to him.
“James.”
He turns to look.
“Don’t ever say that again.” It’s not a demand so much as a plea.
James nods silently, and pulls his friend into a hug.