My life had been like the shadow of the one I was meant to have lived. I suppose that was what Uncle Ian had been trying to tell me. It had been a life of ‘if onlys’ and ‘what ifs?’ Of trying not to take too much because I deserved nothing.
Having found out what really happened to Rose, I could have added a hundred new what ifs and a hundred more if onlys. If only I had seen how mixed up and unhappy that new girl was. If only I had taken her feelings for Portia’s brother seriously. What if I had bothered more, tried harder, been less self-absorbed. What if I hadn’t persuaded her to go to that dance? What if I hadn’t altered her dress?
Jacob Bauer said that none of us knew what misery we might inadvertently have caused. It was just the way life worked. Everything was connected.
He said, ‘You step on to a pedestrian crossing, causing a car to slow down and stop. The tiny delay makes it get on the motorway a fraction of a moment later than it would otherwise have done but just at the moment a lorry pulls out without signalling, causing a crash. Is that your fault?
‘You get the last pint of milk in the store, which forces another guy to go somewhere else for milk, which in turn makes him late to pick up his girlfriend, who ends up accepting a lift from a stranger. Is that your fault, because you bought some milk? And how do you think it works for Gabriel and me? We do our best but there are times when we get it wrong when treating a patient. So what should we all do about it? Lock ourselves away in a small attic room and do nothing for fear that our butterfly wings beating may cause an earthquake in China?’
A young girl had died and all that she might have been was left undiscovered and all that she might have done was left undone. That was the tragedy of Rose and the tragedy of every life cut short.
The rest; well, it should be silence.
Yet mercifully for me, it was not. Because finally, and with a little help from my neighbours, I had begun to look around me and to ask, not ‘What if,’ but ‘What now?’