by Owen Sheers
“Hey,” Josh said to her. “You come to say hello?” He bent to pick her up.
“This is Lucy,” he said, hitching her in the crook of his arm. “And this,” he continued, prising Lucy’s knuckle from her mouth, “is Michael, our new neighbour.”
Lucy buried her face in her father’s shoulder. Grasping at his collar, she rubbed its crease between her fingers.
“Oh, gone shy on us, have you?” Josh said to her, winking at Michael. “We’ll see how long that lasts, eh?”
―
Josh knew his daughter well. Less than half an hour later Lucy came to find Michael in the crowd, a doll in each of her hands. He was sitting on the arm of a sofa, on the edges of a conversation about the local hospital.
“This is Molly,” Lucy said by way of introduction, thrusting one of the dolls towards him. “And this”—she pushed out the other doll, its face marked with blue crayon—“is Dolly.”
“Well, hello,” Michael said. “Good to meet you. But what happened to Dolly’s face?”
“Well,” Lucy said, as if Michael had asked her opinion on the conversation behind him, “it started yesterday, you see. Molly was very cross with Dolly.”
With an ease that seemed foreign to the child he’d met earlier, Lucy began explaining the root of the dolls’ disagreement. As she talked she frowned down at them, both naked, one blonde, one brunette, absorbed in their story. Occasionally she raised her eyebrows, too, dramatically but with sincerity, as if trying out the expression for the first time.
Michael listened, grateful for the length of her explanation and happy to let her talk. He didn’t want to disengage from the party, but the truth was Lucy’s story, the solipsism of her age, had come as a relief to him. Earlier Josh, guiding him with his hand on his back again, had introduced him to a group of other guests. “This is Michael, our new neighbour,” he’d said, before moving on to greet others arriving in the hallway. Michael had shaken hands with them, and appeared to talk easily enough. But beneath the conversation his mind was double-tracking all the time, trying to keep one step ahead so as to steer it away from any question that might force him to mention Caroline or her death.
In the end he needn’t have worried. None of the other guests had seemed perturbed by his reticence, or anxious to question him in return. Ben, a colleague from Josh’s bank, owned a holiday cottage in Cornwall not far from where Michael had been brought up. Within minutes he’d been able to navigate them towards swapping recommendations on restaurants and galleries, coastal walks between shingle coves, hidden pubs. The one woman in the group, a young lawyer who’d introduced herself as “Janera, but call me Jan,” had been eager to tell him about a play she’d just seen. She’d gone on her own and it had made her cry. She couldn’t remember the playwright’s name, but she’d been at college with one of the actors. He’d had a full head of hair back then, but now he was completely bald and it was this, more than the play itself, about which she appeared most excited. The third guest was an older man in a blazer whose name Michael didn’t catch. He asked whether Michael’s flat had a view of the ponds on the Heath? When Michael said it did, the man, whose cheeks were rosy with capillaries, told him how he’d once swum in them on a Christmas Day in the sixties. He’d done it to impress a girl, whose name he’d forgotten now. There’d been a skin of ice at the water’s edge. She’d waited for him on one of the benches, wrapped in both their scarves, laughing.
As Michael listened and talked, nodded and smiled, he felt as if he’d stepped through a looking glass and was observing a world he’d left behind, a more simple, childish world, untutored by death. He knew it wasn’t true, of course. That every adult in the room would have lost. That each of them carried their own grief, however subdued, and that a fear of their own ends haunted them, too, whenever they allowed their thoughts to linger above that darkness. But none of that showed, and why should it? All of it was covered by the talk, the desire, the manners. And so Michael was left feeling adrift, the only seeing witness in a room of the chattering blind.
At their first interview for The Man Who Broke the Mirror, Oliver Blackwood had told Michael a man wasn’t born until he’d had children. At the time Michael said he couldn’t know, not having had any himself, but that he certainly agreed with the French when they said you became an adult only when you lost your parents. He’d spoken from experience. His own father had died while he was in New York. His mother, too, was seriously ill at the time. A year after that interview, she’d also died. Michael, an only child, missed them both terribly. In the months after his mother’s funeral the comment he’d made to Oliver had surfaced in his mind every day.
Michael had only just begun seeing Caroline when he’d answered the phone one morning to hear a carer at the nursing home tell him his mother had “passed on” during the night. Caroline was in the shower, and when she’d come downstairs she’d found Michael, the phone in his hand, staring at the table. They were still just discovering each other. The night he’d find her waiting for him in his bathroom was months away in their future. Their knowledge of each other was shallow. And yet Caroline had accompanied him every step along the deepening shelf of his mother’s death, nurturing him through the funeral and the quiet sadness afterwards. She was acquainted with it. That’s what she’d told him. So he shouldn’t see it as an imposition too soon, upon her or them. She knew death and what it did to the living, so he should let her help him, which he had.
But now, in the wake of hers, Michael couldn’t help think that both Caroline and Oliver had been wrong. If he’d been able to speak to her, if her ghost should have visited him one night, he’d have told her you cannot be familiar with death; it can only be familiar with you. And if he’d known at that first meeting with Oliver what he knew now, then he’d have told him that there was a birth into maturity beyond having children or losing your parents. It was the birth of an amputated love. Of having found a person in whom life makes sense, someone who expands you, only to have their death suddenly close you again, like the teeth of a woodland trap. And in that closing to experience a slow tearing in the fabric of your days, your years. This, he would have told Oliver, is the truest birth into adult knowledge. A rare wisdom shared with life prisoners and locked-in sufferers, to have your future taken from you, and yet still remain alive.
―
“And so Dolly said sorry and now they are friends.” Lucy punctuated the end of her story by jerking the two dolls in the air in front of her, shivering their synthetic hairstyles.
Michael smiled. “Well, I’m glad,” he said. “It’s more fun being friends than not being friends, isn’t it?”
Lucy cocked her head in mock thought. “Maybeee,” she said, drawing out the end of the word.
A woman in a petrol-blue shawl behind them began cracking pistachio shells into a cupped hand, the painted nail of her thumb prising them open. Somewhere by the door the greetings of old friends rose above the room’s murmuring talk, like a piece of driftwood lifted on a wave.
“How old are you, Lucy?” Michael asked her.
“She’s four,” another voice said. Michael looked up to see an older girl looking down at them, her chestnut hair cut in a bob. She wore jeans, trainers, and a sweatshirt with the name of a boy band down one of its sleeves.
“Four and a quarter!” Lucy protested.
“I’m seven,” her older sister said, as if she hadn’t heard her. “My name’s Rachel.”
She spoke confidently, a child brought up among adults.
“Do you want to come and see my drawings?”
“What do you think, Lucy?” Michael said. “Shall we go and see Rachel’s drawings?”
Lucy hit the sofa with Dolly’s head. “They’re stupid drawings!”
“Well,” Michael said, trying to placate her, “isn’t that for me to decide?” He stood up. “Do you want to come, too?”
But Lucy wasn’t listening anymore. Michael’s acceptance of her sister’s invitation had instantly demot
ed him in her interest. Lowering herself beside the sofa, she was already talking to Molly and Dolly instead.
“Come on,” Rachel said, taking his hand. “They’re in the kitchen.”
―
The question Michael had managed to avoid among the Nelsons’ guests was eventually asked by Josh himself. They were standing together at the bottom of the garden, looking out over the ponds. Rachel, as promised, had taken Michael into the kitchen to look at her drawings laid across a coffee table in the conservatory. Samantha had been at the oven, sliding out trays of canapés.
“Now, don’t take up all of Michael’s time,” she’d said, her face flushed in the heat. “Someone else might want to talk to him, too.”
She needn’t have worried. All Rachel had required was a brisk tour through her work before a request from her mother soon sent her back into the party, a bowl of olives in each hand. Michael asked Samantha if he might help, too. Giving him another of her smiles, she told him it was fine. She spoke to him as if they’d known each other for years. And yet her manner was also somehow distant, her air of familiarity defused, he suspected, by the generosity with which it was applied to all whom she met.
Removing a last tray of canapés from the oven, Samantha had followed her daughter down the hallway towards the voices at its end. Michael listened to her heels diminish down the wooden floorboards. He thought about following her but didn’t. After the crush of bodies next door, the quiet of the unpeopled kitchen was calming, as was the cleanness of the winter light falling through the conservatory. He needed time to collect himself before he entered the party again. Or perhaps he would leave. Perhaps it was still too soon. Perhaps, he admitted to himself, he shouldn’t have come at all.
A copy of the Herald Tribune was lying on a chair beside him. Opening it, Michael began flicking through its pages, his eye naturally drawn to articles about the wars. The presidential candidates were filling their speeches with talk of surges and exit strategies. A group of road workers had been killed by ISAF bombing in eastern Afghanistan. An FBI investigation had concluded fourteen civilian deaths at the hands of Blackwater were “killings without cause.” Michael was still reading the paper when Josh entered. He made straight for a drawer in the kitchen’s island and took out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter.
“Smoke?” he said, holding them up.
“No, thanks,” Michael said.
“Join me anyway?” Josh nodded at the back door, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
Outside, the afternoon light had pulled the Heath into focus, a palette of oranges, greens, and browns beneath the blue sky. As Michael and Josh walked down the garden towards the ponds, Josh lit a cigarette.
“Sam doesn’t like it,” he said, the smoke thickening his breath. “But, well, it’s my weekend, too, right?”
As they reached the fence at the bottom, Josh took another deep draw. Leaning against the fence, Michael breathed in more deeply, too. The air above the water tasted of iron and fallen leaves. The trees beyond, which had just that morning been so busy with wind, were bare and motionless. A dog was swimming in the pond, only its golden head visible above the water. Its owner, a woman on the other side, was calling to it from the water’s edge.
“Jasper! Jasper!”
“Christ,” Josh said. “Jasper? No wonder it wants to stay in the fucking pond.”
Michael watched the dog make a slow turn back towards his owner’s voice, his nose high as he paddled into the shallows. Reaching the bank, he trotted up the slope towards her, the long hair of his flanks heavy with water, his paws dark with mud.
“You married, Mike?”
The question seemed to come from nowhere. Michael kept his eyes on Jasper as he stopped short of his owner and shook himself dry. After such attention among the other guests, he’d been distracted by this dog’s brief escape. And now Josh had asked him, so he’d have to answer.
He turned to face him. Josh pointed with his cigarette at Michael’s wedding ring. Michael glanced at it, too. It had never occurred to him to take it off. As far as he was concerned, he was still married.
“I was,” Michael said, touching the underside of the ring with his thumb.
“Ah, shit,” Josh said. “Divorced?”
“No,” Michael replied, looking out at the pond again. “She died.”
“Jesus.”
Michael heard Josh take another drag, then blow out a thin plume. “God,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
Michael had never had to say those two words before. Since returning to London he’d avoided them. But now that he had, they felt untrue. As if someone else were speaking through his mouth.
“I like it best when it’s frozen,” Josh said, drawing his cigarette across the air in front of him, its tip glowing in the movement. “Last year all this, the whole thing, was ice. The girls wanted to skate on it, but, well, you know—”
Michael knew Josh was talking to fill the vacuum. He wanted to let him know he didn’t have to.
“That’s why I moved here,” he said. “We had a place in Wales. But when it happened—”
Josh nodded in understanding, but also, it seemed to Michael, in calculation, too. Was he remembering the night he’d moved in? How they’d stood together in his flat, the meagre pile of boxes and bags abandoned in the living room?
“Was it an accident?” Josh asked.
“Sort of,” Michael said, taking another deep breath and releasing it in a sigh. “But also not. She was in Pakistan. Well, in the border area—”
He broke off, unsure how to continue.
“Was she serving?”
“God, no!” Michael allowed himself a bemused smile at the thought of Caroline in the army. “No, she was a reporter. Wrong place, wrong time. You might have read about it. It was in the papers.”
“What was her name?”
“Caroline,” Michael said. “Caroline Marshall.”
Josh took another drag on his cigarette. “That’s terrible,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m so sorry, Mike. Just terrible.”
Michael nodded. He was right. It was terrible. That was the word, and it would always be the word for it, however much time passed, or however much his memory might fade. He ran his hand across the top of the fence, to feel the realness of its grain, the dampness of its wood against his skin.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to bring it up. I mean, at your party.”
Josh reached out and held Michael by the shoulder, his grip firmer than necessary. “Are you serious?” he said. “Christ, don’t be ridiculous. And anyway, you didn’t bring it up, I did.”
A drift of voices came down the garden. Some of the guests had moved into the kitchen.
“If there’s anything we can do,” Josh said, “just let us know. I’m serious. Please.”
Michael nodded. “Thanks.”
The back door opened and the chatter of the party became louder.
“We should get back,” Josh said, stubbing out his cigarette and slipping the butt in his pocket. “Or at least I should.”
“No,” Michael said, letting go of the fence. “I’m fine. I’ll come, too.”
As they walked up the garden Josh touched Michael’s arm again. “So what’s it you do, Mike? To keep the wolf from the door?”
“I’m a writer,” Michael said.
“Yeah?” Josh said. “Anything published?”
“One book. Too many articles.”
“Hey, that’s great!” Josh said with too much enthusiasm.
“And you’re with Lehman’s?” Michael asked.
“Yeah, in brokerage, mostly,” Josh said, as if that’s what everyone did. “Hey, listen, there’s someone here I want you to meet. Old college buddy of mine, Tony. He and his wife have just moved over. He’s a publisher.”
As they neared the back door, Samantha appeared at the top of the steps. Her face was tense. “Joshua?” she said, showing her palms in exasperation.
“Is Tony i
n there, honey?” Josh asked. “I want him to meet Mike. Mike’s a writer, did he tell you that?”
―
In the years to come, Michael would often think how it was Tony, more than anyone else, he had to thank for his friendship with the Nelsons. Or perhaps to blame, given what happened because of it. Had Tony and his wife, Maddy, not been at the party that day, then it was more than possible Michael would have remained no more than a neighbour to Josh and Samantha. Morning greetings, occasional conversations over the hedge dividing his communal garden from their private lawn, glimpses of them emerging from a taxi at night, a streetlight catching their clothes as they passed into the shadows.
Perhaps there would have been other parties, and maybe at one of them someone else would have performed a similar role to Tony’s that Saturday in November. But Michael doubted it. There are narrow windows for certain beginnings. Multiple strands of personal histories, psychologies, emotions that intersect once only, and then never again. There is, in the end, a time for everything. This is what Michael told himself in the years afterwards. Sometimes in consolation, more often in regret. That however much he tried to unpick those threads, however much he attempted to locate the source moment of what had happened, he could not. There was always another beyond it, connected by the most fragile of strands, but connected still. Time had travelled through all of them—him, Caroline, Samantha, Josh, Lucy, Rachel—and there was nothing they could have done about it. None of their choices had been malign. And yet combined, they’d created darkness more than light.
For the other residents of South Hill Drive, the nature of Michael’s friendship with Samantha and Josh was difficult to fathom. Viewed from a distance, it seemed both unlikely and imbalanced. Him, a young single widower, reticent with grief, a freelancer adrift on the hours of the day. Them, a young family busy with the tides of life, with the schedules and demands of their shared hours.
But it wasn’t just the differing makeup of their lives that led others on the street to comment or question. It was also the momentum of their relationship, the speed at which they’d become so intimate following that party. Over the next seven months their involvement in one another’s lives deepened to a degree that all of them had only ever experienced before after a period of years. Within a few weeks Michael and Josh were regularly to be seen leaving of a morning for their jogs on the Heath; when the girls came home from school and nursery they soon got used to Michael joining them in their kitchen, having tea with Samantha or even helping with their homework as she prepared dinner. He and Samantha often met during the days, too, at the cafés edging the Heath or in the canteen of Kenwood House. Three or four times a week, as Josh exited the Tube station in Belsize Park, Michael’s phone would light up with a text on his desk—“Come round for a drink?” By the time it was Christmas it already seemed natural that Michael should join them for lunch, arriving at their back door with an armful of presents for the girls and a bottle of champagne for their parents. All of which puzzled their other neighbours on the street who followed, through windows and rumour, their accelerated friendship. What these neighbours couldn’t appreciate, however, was that the source of their surprise was also its reason. It was exactly because of its newness, its lack of depth, that Michael, Samantha, and Josh had embraced their newfound companionship with the familiarity of years.
