Five first chances, p.1
Five First Chances, page 1
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2023 by Sarah Jost
Cover and internal design © 2023 by Sourcebooks
Cover illustration by Elizabeth Turner Stokes
Internal design by Laura Boren/Sourcebooks
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jost, Sarah, author.
Title: Five first chances : a novel / Sarah Jost.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2023]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022028654 (print) | LCCN 2022028655 (ebook) | (trade paperback) | (epub)
Subjects: LCGFT: Romance fiction. | Time-travel fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PR9160.9.J67 F58 2023 (print) | LCC PR9160.9.J67
(ebook) | DDC 823/.92--dc23/eng/20220719
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028654
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028655
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Monday, July 15, 2019
Chance 1
Saturday, July 15, 2017
Friday, August 18, 2017
Sunday, March 18, 2018
Saturday, December 15, 2018
Chance 2
Saturday, July 15, 2017
Saturday, July 22, 2017
Friday, August 18, 2017
Friday, October 13, 2017
Sunday, December 24, 2017
Sunday, March 18, 2018
Chance 3
Saturday, July 15, 2017
Friday, August 18, 2017
Sunday, December 24, 2017
Friday, February 16, 2018
Sunday, March 18, 2018
Thursday, August 23, 2018
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Chance 4
Friday, August 18, 2017
Sunday, December 24, 2017
Friday, February 16, 2018
Sunday, March 18, 2018
Thursday, August 23, 2018
Saturday, December 15, 2018
Chance 5
Saturday, July 15, 2017
Saturday, July 15, 2017
Sunday, December 14, 2017
Sunday, March 18, 2018
Saturday, December 15, 2018
Monday, January 7, 2019
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Date unknown
Monday, July 15, 2019
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
March 18, in the future
Reading Group Guide
A Conversation with the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
To Dora Kislig, beloved grandmother and vanilla pretzel queen
Monday, July 15, 2019
Baby elephants can die of loneliness.
I’m hiding at the darker end of the room, in this village pub erected so close to the church that either would crumble without the other. I sneaked out after the service; now, at the wake, while I wait anxiously for somebody to come and ask how I knew Nick (I didn’t, not really), I’m reviewing my life and regrets, basking in the proximity of death like a chicken roasting in its own juices. Compressing the past four years of my life into my brain, trying to figure out where it’s all gone wrong.
“Time is a funny thing,” I tell Yuki when she returns. She went to offer her condolences to the family, all huddled together in the bay window.
She leans next to me against the bar. The voices around us are muffled, the carpet dappled in burning puddles of sun. There’s a garden out there, full of grass and flowers and cats, but it must have been deemed too hot, too cheery for the occasion. Or nobody could stand to be judged by cats today, and I can’t blame them.
Yuki checks her glass, which still stands empty where she left it. Was I supposed to get her another drink? Be her funeral wingwoman? She sighs as she orders, the tips of her fingers drumming on the bar. Her nail polish is unusually flaky, like the paint of those neglected houses by the seaside. That’s all I seem to be able to see in England nowadays: the crumbling plaster, the burst fast-food bags, the electric wires threatening to come loose.
“Yeah, I know what you mean, Lou,” she says. “If only we could go back and see Nick again.”
“Of course,” I say. Yuki’s eyes are deep, slightly swollen, ringed with eyeliner gone blurry. “I mean, this is such a tragedy.”
“But? Go on, I know you have something on your mind.”
“I—I can’t stop thinking I’ve messed up my life.”
“Ah, mate. You and me both.”
When she called me last week, saying her friend Nick had died, asking me to go with her to the funeral, I was surprised. We hadn’t been in touch much the past two years, since she’d put an end to our flat share to move in with her best friend, Lucy. We had gotten along well when we lived together, had been lucky given the randomness of our pairing, but it had fizzled out.
I was desperate when I met Yuki. The end of my teacher training year was in sight, I’d gotten my first job, I had to leave university accommodation, and I was terrified of setting out by myself in a foreign country for the first time. I’d gone on SpareRoom, scrolling through a world of bachelor pads, rehabilitated cupboards, and dark bedrooms brimming with spooky dolls. When I found Yuki’s ad, I kept thinking there had to be a catch. Even after she’d let me into the neat top-floor flat padded with soft furnishings, even after she’d called me mate and asked eagerly about types of fondue. We only lived together for a year, and I know now, retrospectively, that it was my best year in the UK. My best relationships always seem to be short.
During that out-of-the-blue phone call, I remember hearing Yuki only faintly over the sound of a lawn mower, as if her voice itself, normally pure and confident, was being chopped up in small blades. “But you and Nick have friends in common,” I tried to argue, thinking of her clique from uni and work, their house parties and big nights out. Panicking at the thought of intruding where I didn’t belong. “I hardly knew him at all. Will Lucy not be there?”
“Lucy’s in Barcelona for work,” Yuki said. I could tell she was upset, and I’d never known her to be upset, not really. Her mood and direction were meant to be constant, like a shiny boat. “I’d like someone with me. Someone neutral.”
“Is it because I’m Swiss?” I joked.
“Lou. Please, matey. I don’t want to be there alone. My other friends will all have babies to wipe or whatever.”
So I said yes, and she seemed to want to say more but changed the subject, and we talked about how glad we were to be childless. It was like those old conversations we used to have, sunk into the numerous cushions of her sofa. It made me realize how much I had missed them.
I never had enough time to get to know Nick, however, which made the funeral today rather uncomfortable. As I sat in the hushed silence before the beginning of the service, in the rustle of tissues and quiet sobs, hiding my phone between my knees, I felt like one of my pupils, waiting to be caught out. The church was packed, and the doors had been wedged open to allow people to spill outside. There was an older lady, in some kind of hiking trousers and a chunky necklace, who had to stand by our pew; whoever she was, she must have known Nick better than I did. I was checking tribute messages on his social media, cramming homework, as it were. His grin on his profile picture was wide, his face handsome and relaxed. With his sun-kissed hair tied back, his stubble, and his hoodie, he looked so wholesome, like he’d just been doing some casual rock climbing.
Nick Harper you legend can’t believe your gone. Rest in peace wherever u are
What a loss. Such a genuine and generous lad. Love to all the family. Will miss your smile so much, and all your wise advice. I’ll never forget your help xoxo
Nick, you always made us laugh. You were a wonde
I ended up scrolling all the way back to two days after Nick’s death, when his sister, Charlotte, had written about the funeral on his page: Close friends and family only—she clearly didn’t want to share it with the world. I clicked on her Instagram username, and there she was, sitting on a herringbone wooden floor, wrapped in a robe fluffy enough to have been spun by Cinderella’s mice, one arm hugging a Bernese mountain dog. I felt some envy for her life, the striking quality of it, her confidence, with huge additional shame for that envy, because she had just lost her brother.
Then Yuki elbowed me hard. “You’re not stalking Romain? I thought you’d stopped,” she scolded, looking over my shoulder, her intrusion bringing my thoughts right back to him. Not that I’d stopped thinking about him. Being at this funeral had made me realize that in all the time I’d been in England, I hadn’t met anyone who mattered as much to me as he did. The loneliness of this was suddenly unbearable, a dull ache I’d been living with and ignoring for years. When sitting in a church pew surrounded by mourners, I could no longer ignore it.
Romain wasn’t my first love, but he was the one that mattered. One of those people who comes along to rescue you from all your doubts and insecurities. With them, you find yourself standing in a new landscape, holding bricks and mortar and desperate to get building, and then, suddenly…a landslide. Something due to your own negligence; you didn’t protect your foundations, ignored the rough terrain, and all at once, you’re sucked into a gaping hole. When he broke up with me, back home in Switzerland, my grief spread to the landscape, to the towns and train stations where I might bump into him, to the cafés we’d sat in together. Everywhere I looked was haunted by what our relationship would never be. And it was my fault.
So in September 2015, I moved away to England, carrying his ghost with me in my suitcase, along with my brand-new, optimistic, ten-item wardrobe of reinvention. Leaving behind my sister, Marion, and my mother, who I thought were fine.
Romain sent me letters, making my heart leap every time I recognized his writing. I bent Yuki’s ears at first, even a year in. “Ah, Romain le writer, what a tristesse,” she would sympathize. Her fake French is the worst. She got a C in secondary school—they all do here. Believe me, it’s not a gauge of quality. She pronounces his name Romaan; I’ve long stopped correcting her. There was comfort, though, in her acknowledging his existence, at a time when I thought I might have dreamt that we ever were together. Little by little, the distance seemed to work, the letters became more sporadic, and I stopped bringing him up, convincing myself I had moved on.
Except I’m looking back now, and I realize I haven’t progressed at all. I haven’t gotten over anything; I’ve been stuck in time.
“You know, we met Nick exactly two years ago on this day.” Yuki’s words bring me back to the present: the wake. She takes a big gulp of her fresh Diet Coke. I’m drinking lager, even if I know my stomach will be torn apart later with acidity and gas. I was hoping a pint would help me blend in, but the other women all appear to be drinking small glasses of white wine.
I turn to her. Her face is so sad, still, as if made of wax.
“Was that your birthday? At the Five Horseshoes?” I ask her. I only have vague memories of that night, a quick chat with Nick at the bar, perhaps about animals, which seems to be my only safe subject of conversation. Two years ago to this day; if I think back to where I was, things must have been looking up. I was just finishing my first year of teaching, and I was exhausted, but I remember excitement too. Yuki had moved out, but she had invited me to her birthday, and it looked like I was going to make it. I would become a real teacher, my new friendships might last the distance, it was summer…
“I saw you cried during the service,” Yuki says.
“Maybe. It was moving.”
I can’t tell her the truth. That I have stored a program I saw, the one about the lonely baby elephants, for these kinds of occasions. When I need something to attach my pain to and need it quickly.
I watched the program one evening after a particularly bad day at school, when one of the Year 10 boys had run out of the classroom and started sprinting around and around the building like a crazed firecracker while the rest of the class cheered him from the windows. There was a tiny orphan elephant that had to sleep under a blanket and grew too attached to his keeper. The keeper knew it wasn’t good; the calf loved him, but he would die if he didn’t make any elephant friends. During Nick’s eulogy, I allowed myself to spend some time there, in the vivid memory of the calf’s story. The way he looked so small under the giant blanket. How he struggled to know what to do once he met other orphans. After a while, I realized everybody around me was crying, and I was crying too.
“It’s so fucking tragic,” Yuki says, clearly referring to Nick’s death.
Funerals do this to you: they are endings but also beginnings. They point with awful clarity to the gaps in your own life. If things were looking up two years ago, that light has since dimmed. Now I’m thirty-three years old, in a country that still feels foreign, living in a tiny soulless studio I can barely afford, students rioting as I teach them the French words for fruit and vegetables, my social life peppered with acquaintances and work colleagues who never quite become friends, my phone silent. Wishing it would all get better by itself, magically, with time.
What happened to me? How did it all slide downhill so slowly that I’m only now realizing the extent of the damage?
I look at Yuki’s profile, wondering whether she knows me well enough to explain it to me, taking in her bob of dyed blond hair, more frizzy than usual, the Japanese tattoo on her forearm hinting at some unspoken heritage, though I know from the official-looking letters she received when we lived together that her legal name is Anna. “Are you okay?” I ask her.
She shrugs. I’m not sure where we stand anymore, what degree of intimacy we operate on. How to get back to what we once had, which I played down at the time. I keep looking at her, not knowing what I should say and saying nothing. And to make matters worse, Nick’s sister is watching us across the room, coming our way. She’ll interrogate me about my relationship with Nick and find out I have none. It will be awful.
I don’t know how I know this, but I do.
My brain goes into panic mode—it is constantly involved in the anticipation of events. I play through my typical mishaps as if watching a film preview, to the point where I feel I’ve lived them already. Yuki used to say I was anxious, socially awkward, but even she doesn’t understand to what extent. I try to steady myself by gripping the bar, but it’s sticky with cider.
Italian has a word for the ring-shaped print of your drink: culaccino. In the rising unease, I try it aloud.
“Culaccino. Nick’s sister is coming.”
“Is that a swear word? Didn’t know you spoke Italian too,” Yuki says.
I don’t speak Italian. I spent my Swiss childhood reading cereal boxes where everything was written in three languages. Perhaps that counts as trilingual here.
“She’s coming,” I repeat. Yuki clearly hasn’t grasped the gravity of the situation. I’m praying for her to get me out of it, perhaps fireman-carry me out of the pub, but now she seems transfixed by Charlotte, who is closing in with calm purpose, silver bracelets clinking, as if she were Medusa and had turned Yuki to stone.
We’re utterly broken to let you know that Nick passed away on Wednesday, July 3. If you wish to pay tribute to him at this point in time, please do it here. We’ll leave his page running for a while. Don’t have the heart to pick up the phone at the moment, but thank you for your support.
“Hi again, Yuki,” Charlotte says, but she’s looking at me.
“Hi.” Yuki comes back to life, combs through her hair.
“Where’s your dog?” I blurt out before mortification hits. That’s what we call jumping from the cockerel to the donkey, sauter du coq à l’âne. I always do this when I’m embarrassed, put on the spot. That’s why, most of the time, it’s wiser for me not to do or say anything. Both Charlotte and Yuki startle, but Charlotte recovers first.
“Chomsky’s with his borrower.”
“Borrower?”
