She blinked. Her eyes were wet. “Oh. Fuck.” She stood abruptly and stumbled to the front of the coffeehouse.
Cath and Nev were whispering to each other, and May had pulled her chair closer to speak with Allie about some of the details of Ben’s journey north and who would pick their father up at the airport should the time come tomorrow that they needed to.
Winston watched his daughter, who wasn’t smiling at this most recent customer. She made his drink, handed it over, and he said something, frowning. She took it back. Dumped it in the sink. Made it a second time.
Bea’s phone buzzed beside his thigh. He picked it up and set it on the arm of the sofa. On the screen, the text notification said simply, Mum.
When the customer left the counter and his daughter headed into the back of the store, Winston followed her.
He found her in the back room, huddled between a stack of giant sacks of coffee and an industrial sink. “Bea?”
“Leave me alone.”
Head bowed, arms crossed over her knees, she looked like the child she still was, far from her mother, far from home, and he felt the same urge from earlier—to take her back, somehow, and put her where she belonged and had been safe.
He squatted down beside her. “What’s going on?”
She shook her head.
“I see that your mum’s been texting you and you’re upset. You’re going to have to tell me the rest, bun.”
She sniffled. He looked for a handkerchief in his pocket, but she’d made him stop carrying them. He found a roll of stiff brown toweling and tore her off a piece.
“You look tired,” he said. “Perhaps you only need to rest. Sometimes when we don’t sleep enough, we find ourselves overwhelmed with anger, or tears, and—”
“I can’t sleep.”
“What’s preventing you?”
“I fall asleep okay, but then I wake up, and I can’t stop thinking about Everest,
you know those pictures, that dead guy with the green boots? He has a family still alive, and everyone calls him Green Boots. People use him as a landmark.” Winston considered whether he should put his arm around her. Whether she’d let him. But when he tried to, finally, move closer, she crossed her arms over her knees and shifted away, her eyes hard. “Or I saw this Instagram account, this guy who was at the third camp, the last one before you attempt the summit, and he was trying to acclimate to the altitude but he looks so terrible, Dad, his lips are cracked and he’s sunburned, and he stopped making sense, you know, because there’s not enough oxygen and his brain was dying, and I keep thinking that’s going to be Mum.” She lunged to her feet and began pacing back and forth. “She’s a terrible mum.”
“That’s not true.” He stood, rather awkwardly finding purchase against the sink. “You know it isn’t.”
“She ran out on both of us, left me with you, and now she’s going to die on a mountain, and—and I didn’t even tell her thank you for my birthday present. I can’t phone her because I didn’t say thank you and I never return her calls. I can’t—”
“Beatrice.”
He made his voice just stern enough to stop her talking, because it never helped her to say all her anxieties aloud, it only made her more worked up and upset. She’d always had to be told to stop. Just stop.
“You need rest.”
“I’ve tried. I can’t sleep.”
“Your body needs rest even if you lie in bed awake with your eyes closed.”
“You always say that.”
“It’s true.”
She wiped her face on her shirt and looked at him, challenging and afraid. “She’s a completely rubbish mother, selfish and awful. And you’re no better, you just want me to do all the same things you wanted her to do and be a proper English lady and eat meals on tablecloths and it’s bullshit.”
In that moment, his daughter sounded so much like a child that it hurt to look at her—the puffy skin around her new tattoo, her rainbow hair, her utter confusion.
It hurt, and made him feel frustrated, angry, and utterly impotent. He didn’t know, truly, what to do with her.
He wasn’t her mum. He’d tried to replace Rosemary and failed. He’d tried to give Beatrice what she needed and failed, so he’d tried giving her what she wanted, but that was no better.