The Road to Zoe by Nick Alexander

Author:Nick Alexander [Alexander, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2020-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

The postcards had started about a month after her disappearance. They’d arrived quite regularly at first, sometimes just a week or two apart. But as time went by they became less and less frequent, until, towards the end, they only ever came on my birthday.

They were sent not to our house but to my friend Gary Mason’s place. He lived just around the corner from us, and Gary would bring them into school for me.

Zoe never said much in them, except that she was fine, that I shouldn’t worry, and, in the early ones at least, that I shouldn’t tell Mum she was writing to me.

The secrecy part of it was challenging, because Mum was worried sick about Zoe. And I mean that quite literally. She wasn’t sleeping, and she wasn’t eating much either, which was unusual. In the past, Mum had always reacted to stress by pigging out, but this time she looked so pale and thin that one of my schoolfriends assumed she had cancer. So I felt torn between Zoe, who’d made me feel quite special by choosing to secretly send the postcards to me, and Mum, who desperately needed good news.

In the end, it worried me so much that I texted Scott to ask him to call me. It was the first time I’d communicated with him since he’d left, so we chatted for a while, just like old times, and then I explained my dilemma.

He asked me how often Mum made my bed. Though it was a strange question, I assumed he had a plan – Scott always had a plan – and so I told him that she straightened the covers most days and changed the sheets about once every two weeks.

‘Hide them under your pillow for a couple of weeks,’ he told me. ‘And then stick ’em under your mattress. That way she’ll find them, but it won’t be your fault.’

So that’s exactly what I chose to do.

Mum stopped making my bed around then. She even told me, in a fake pique of anger, that she was sick of doing everything and that it was time I made my bed for myself. I was pretty certain that this meant she’d found the postcards, and wanted to continue finding them but without me realising she had. Just to make sure, I arranged them in a specific way and took a photo with my camera so that I could see if they’d moved even the tiniest bit. By the time I got home that night, she’d been at them.

Mum seemed happier, or at least less unhappy, after that, and I got to kind of respect Zoe’s wishes. I’d also opened a communications channel with Scott, and I was grateful, now it had happened, to have had such a good excuse to do so. Because chatting to Scott really cheered me up.

About a year after I started college, Gary Mason’s family moved to Altrincham, and that was the end of my postcard delivery service.

I went back to his old house just once, a few weeks after my twenty-first birthday.

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