The Things We Know Now

by Catherine Dunne

  Frances and Sophie have had less dramatic lives. As I’ve already related, Frances married Martin in 1997 and within a year, had twin boys: Tom and shy, gentle Jack. And the year after that, Sophie and Pete tied the knot quietly: neither had wanted the fuss that had attended Rebecca’s and Frances’s nuptial extravaganzas.

  Their three children, Pete Junior, Cecilia and Barry brought the grand total of my grandchildren to seven: steps of stairs, as they say, today ranging from Ian – now almost nineteen, to Barry, just turned eight.

  And those are the children who will gather this evening in order to celebrate the completion of my seventy-fourth year on this earth. They are all, as yet, unaware of the nature of the twin ‘celebration’ that will be taking place in their grandfather’s home. But that is not for now: that is for later in my story.

  For it concerns that new and uncertain future, that whole sea of possibilities that I am not sure I have the ability to navigate, not yet. It is difficult enough attempting to deal, however imperfectly, with what has already passed; the problems posed by the unknown are even more daunting.

  But back to this evening: I love all of my grandchildren, as does Ella. Nevertheless, there are times when I cannot bear to be in their company. They are all, each of them in their separate ways, a living reminder of what I have lost. Jack, with his violin. Cecilia with her piano, Barry with his precocious talent for art.

  Each of them, in his or her own way, makes live again that September afternoon when Daniel stepped out of our lives and the world ceased turning.

  Part Two: One Week in September

  Sunday 20th to Sunday 27th September, 2009

  Maryam

  MARYAM HEARS DANIEL’S light, rapid footsteps on the stairs. He must have left something at home. She looks out of the kitchen window and sees where he’d propped his bike up earlier, its bright blue pannier a coloured shout against the brownish hedge. It had never grown properly, that hedge, never thrived. When she and Rahul had first come here, she’d had great hopes for it, despite its sullenness. But now, her husband doesn’t even bother to trim it.

  Maryam jumps, startled as the outer door crashes back against the wall. She sees the boy hurtle towards his bike. His white trainers flash against the dull grey of the flagstones. For a moment, she stands by the sink, transfixed. She tries to decode what she is seeing. Navy tracksuit; bright blue sky; silver-flashing bike. She has the sense, a familiar one, that there is some nuance here, some thrust of language that she does not understand. It is all too quick: like someone speaking too fast, careless of their listener, not waiting for her understanding to catch up.

  Something must be wrong. In the time it takes her to wrench open the kitchen door, to step outside into the sunshine, the boy has already leaped onto his bike and even now is reaching the gate to the roadway.

  ‘Daniel!’ she calls, waving at his retreating back. And ‘Daniel!’ again. But he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t even turn to look at her over one shoulder, the way he always does as he says goodbye. He doesn’t wave. Instead, he turns left, towards home. Slowly, Maryam lowers her arm. Daniel is a nice boy, a good boy. He respects his parents and the parents of others. She stands, watching the space where he has just been. It seems to shimmer in the sunlight, filled with his absence, redolent of his presence. Maryam turns back towards the house and goes up the stairs to her son’s bedroom.

  She’ll have to be a little bit careful. Edward is changing. She has spoken of this to Rahul, but he has brushed her words away. ‘He’s becoming a man,’ is all he will say. He becomes impatient at her probing, tells her to leave the boy alone. But she can’t. Edward is her eldest, her firstborn; her son. How can she not want to know? How can she not want to understand the things that are happening to him? Particularly here, where everything remains so different, so puzzling, even now.

  She knocks on Edward’s door.

  ‘Yeah?’

  She hears the word, still hates it. ‘Edward? May I come in?’

  There is the faint sound of shuffling. She wonders what he is hiding from her this time. The door opens. Edward stands before her and there is an air of defiance around him, a gauzy light that she can almost taste. A kitbag, still unzipped, sits on top of his unmade bed. ‘Is everything all right?’ When he doesn’t answer, she gestures towards the stairs. Perhaps more explanation is necessary. She says, in a tone as light as she can manage, ‘It’s just that Daniel left in a hurry, and I thought he looked upset.’

  Edward shrugs. ‘He got somethin’ wrong, that’s all.’

  Maryam waits. She has discovered that waiting is often a good tactic.

  But Edward turns his back to her and goes towards the bed. He zips his bag closed. The sound is brisk, final, like a full stop. Then he seems to change his mind, to offer her something after all. ‘Daniel forgot that I have football practice this morning. He wanted us to do other stuff. But I couldn’t.’ He hefts the bag off the bed, slings its strap over one shoulder.

  ‘I see.’ But what she sees is her son’s troubled face. His expression is shadowed with something that she cannot read. ‘Will you call him later?’

  ‘Yeah. I said I’d text him, but—’

  She looks at him. She can’t help it that her whole face is now a question.

  ‘I can’t be with him all the time.’ Now Edward is impatient, on the verge of another explosion. Instead, he grabs his bag tightly and pushes past her. ‘I have to go.’

  Maryam stands back, leaving space for her son’s anger to follow him down the stairs. He slams the back door shut behind him. She hears the metallic rattle of the bolt on the bike shed, the shriek as it slides back, then forward again. By the time she reaches the kitchen, her son has gone. Nonetheless, she watches anxiously to make sure that he has safely made the right-hand turn onto the road that leads to the school, and the football pitch. She still feels that he is way too careless of speeding cars. Just because there is so little traffic around here doesn’t mean that you don’t need to look out for the unexpected. She tells him this, over and over.

  But she knows that he doesn’t listen.

  Patrick

  MONDAY DAWNED AT LAST.

  I watched as the dirty orange light finally crept over the horizon. The whole world was tainted, it seemed to me; everything had changed, changed utterly since the day before. My mind, my memory, my whole self was enmeshed in the endless replaying of the previous afternoon. The salty tang of sea air; the quick, racing terror of the drive home; the moment in my son’s room when our future – Ella’s and mine and Daniel’s – fell away from us. It seemed to me then that I had never felt, never truly experienced loss in all its rawness, until that moment. Not even after the death of my beloved Cecilia. This was grief of a different order. I was unable to tear myself away from that single instant of discovery. I kept seeing it over and over again in my own private cinema. Each familiar scene brought with it the most exquisite pain: a new and refined form of torture that left me at times both doubled over and breathless.

  On that awful afternoon – which, as I write, three and a half years later, still feels as though it was only yesterday – we laid Daniel on his bed together, his mother and I. We covered him gently with a blanket. He might have been asleep, but for the ghastly blue-tinged pallor of his face. Ella wouldn’t leave him, kept one of his hands pressed between both of hers as though she could warm him back to life. ‘I’m going to call Gillian,’ I said. ‘She’ll know what to do. I’ve got to go downstairs to get her number, but I’ll be right back. I’ll make the call from here.’

  But Ella shook her head. ‘Outside,’ she whispered, her voice already hoarse from weeping. ‘Outside the door, on the landing. But stay where I can see you.’

  I stroked the hair back from around her face. She leaned her cheek into my hand, and we stayed like that for several moments, looking down at Daniel. I needed to feel her touch. I was afraid that this loss would have the power to drive us apart. I wanted, above everything, to prevent that from
happening.

  ‘He looks more peaceful now, doesn’t he?’ she asked. I could hear the appeal in her voice. My beautiful boy, she’d said, over and over, as we carried him together to his bed, wrapping him with agonized tenderness in a blanket – as though he were a baby again.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He does.’ For one wild moment after we had taken him down, I believed – hoped – that the boy in my arms was not my son. I did not want to remember his expression. I was comforted now to see him begin to inhabit his own features again.

  I called our family doctor, Gillian, who took over, as I knew she would. Trusting her with all that was practical meant that I could go back and be with my family and sit with them. We had perhaps an hour together, Daniel, Ella and I, or maybe a lifetime – I no longer know, time was a substance that lost its contours that day – before the ambulance arrived, and the police. I knew what was happening and what would happen next. I had seen it before. I was swathed in some merciful armour of numbness, otherwise I doubt that I would have been able to watch my ravaged wife.

  Grief-stricken. Never was a phrase more apt. Stricken, felled, undone by loss. When the ambulance men removed Daniel’s body – and they did so as gently as they could – I brought Ella into our bedroom and wrapped her in the duvet. She rocked back and forth, rhythmically, her occasional shivering cries like the whimpering of a wounded animal. I was afraid that pieces of her were breaking away, that her whole self had shattered. I put both my arms around her and gathered her to me. I remember being filled with an overwhelming need to put her back together again.

  But she wasn’t with me; not in any real sense. Afterwards, she had no memory of those hours – she still hasn’t. We have often spoken of them since, at her request. I fill in all the details, over and over again. But those hours remain, in my view, mercifully blank: they are white, she says, and flat, just like paper.

  The only thing she remembers with any clarity from those first two days is the moment when we had to discuss Daniel’s funeral. I think I brought it up, as gently as I could, sometime on the Monday night when we were finally alone.

  ‘No church,’ she’d said at once. ‘Absolutely no church: I’m far too angry at God.’

  I didn’t pursue it.

  Gillian arrived on that Sunday afternoon within twenty minutes of my call. She embraced both of us, and left us alone with Daniel until the ambulance arrived. ‘Sweetheart,’ she said to Ella as my wife howled, her eyes unseeing. ‘I’m going to give you something to help you rest, just for a couple of hours.’ Then she turned to me.

  ‘Patrick—?’

  ‘I’m fine, Gillian. I’m fine. You just look after Ella. I need to call my daughters.’

  She nodded. ‘We’ll speak later. Don’t worry. I won’t leave her. I’ll take care of her for you.’

  I went downstairs and made one more phone call, to Frances. Within the hour, it seemed, she was on our doorstep, with Sophie in tow. Both of my daughters’ faces were ashen. We held each other without a word. We waited until Ella woke, and they sat with her, holding her hands, letting her wail, or fall silent. From time to time, they wept with her, with me, the two of them embracing us and each other. I could see on both their faces the shocked realization of what had happened. Their eyes reflected back to her Ella’s own horror.

  ‘Why?’ she kept saying. ‘Why? What was wrong that we didn’t see?’ She looked dazed, her small face like the faces of the refugees I had once seen in South Africa: grey, bewildered, out of time. But she was desperate to be present, substantial again. I could see it in the way she spoke to my daughters, the way she struggled towards coherence. And I was grateful for that.

  ‘What was it that we didn’t know? When we left, he had already gone over to Edward’s. We watched him cycle away. He even waved and smiled back at us. He was happy. What happened to make him do this?’

  She asked these same questions over and over again, as though some meaning, some answer, would reveal itself to her by dint of repetition. Later, she would do the same with physical activity: walking around and around in circles, searching, always searching for the answers that neither of us could find.

  Neighbours started to call, as is customary in this place. The unusual activity of the ambulance and the police car had alerted people for miles around, all going about their normal Sunday evening business. And so they came, offering comfort, whispered words of condolence, promises of help at any time.

  I felt sorry for the elderly priest and the even more elderly minister when they came to pay their respects. They arrived together, shortly after Daniel’s death had become public knowledge. Ella raged suddenly at both of them, and Frances and Sophie tried to calm her. I had to ask both men to leave, but I was deeply moved by their distress and by the kindliness of their intentions.

  ‘Forgive us,’ I said, ‘this is a most difficult time for me and my family.’

  ‘No, Mr Grant,’ one of them said – I can’t remember which one. ‘It is we who are sorry, not to be able to bring you and your wife any solace.’

  In the end, Ella relented, and Daniel was brought to the local church: mostly because we had no resources to organize an alternative service of our own. I regret that. I feel it might have offered us greater comfort.

  The school principal, Frank Murray, called, along with the school chaplain. Ella refused to see them. Once Frances and Sophie had left, she said that she would see nobody else that night. I continued to answer the door, the phone, the mobile. I did so until half-past ten that evening. Then I locked my front door and shut down all methods of communication.

  I still feel badly, however, even at this remove, that I did not answer the door to Maryam. I caught a sideways glimpse of her as I came back down to the conservatory at one point, having lowered all the blinds upstairs at Ella’s request. I know that she cannot have seen me: I stood well back from the window. It is always possible to see far more clearly when looking out than looking in. I was suddenly saddened by Maryam’s arrival, I have to admit that. It cannot have been easy for her to come here. Watching her, all I could think of was how Daniel and Edward had been joined at the hip since they were babies. Nursery school, summer holidays, primary school: they were always together. Edward was the brother that Daniel would never have.

  It was precisely for that reason that I did not wish to see Maryam; precisely for that reason that I ignored her ring at the doorbell. Part of me was filled with an abrupt, incandescent rage. Her son was still alive; probably watching TV at this very moment, his long body slung all over the sofa. I had a sudden, shocking memory of Friday – barely three days earlier – as he and Daniel battled each other in some computer game. They sat together on the floor of the TV room, their eyes riveted to the leaping figures on the screen. They didn’t even hear me come in.

  ‘Just one of the neighbours,’ I said to Ella. ‘We’ll deal with them tomorrow.’ She nodded, hardly hearing me, I think.

  Rebecca did not call. At first, I focused all my rage on her. Look what has happened, I wanted to say; now are you proud of your coldness towards me, my wife, my son – your brother – for all these years? Now do you see what you have done?

  But it was Sophie who reminded me, gently, that Rebecca was in the United States, on a plane home even as we spoke. For an instant, I felt sorry for her: hurtling through the glowering skies, unknowing. Then I gathered numbness around me again. It was easier than feeling.

  ‘We’ve left a message on her mobile,’ Sophie said. ‘And on the answering machine at home. Don’t worry, Dad: we’ll phone whoever needs to be phoned. Just take care of yourself and Ella.’

  I reflected bitterly that I hadn’t been able to take care of us in the only way that mattered. After Frances and Sophie left, Ella and I sat together until well after midnight. We talked, wept, agonized. Any movement was painful: walking to the bathroom, switching on a lamp, entering the kitchen. Every activity was overshadowed by the loss of Daniel: he will never do this again; we will never see him smil
e again; he will never be here with us in this house again. The light has gone out of our lives.

  And now a whole new day had to be faced: one that already felt menacing in its approach. It was just after six on that first Monday morning when I came down to the kitchen. Ella had finally slept at around four – a Seconal-induced slumber that would probably last only a short time. Gillian had insisted. Ella had refused at first, and I didn’t push her.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ she’d whispered. ‘If I sleep I’ll dream about Daniel. And then I’ll have to wake and find that he’s not here.’

  I couldn’t argue with the logic of that. I’d had to stop myself several times from thinking about the terrifying emptiness of the next day, and the day after that. I focused instead on getting us through all the minutes of that first evening, one after the other. I became utterly intent on the present, albeit a present that was shadowed by the unspeakable vision of my fourteen-year-old son stepping bluntly to his death. What stalked me too was the agony of not having been there to protect him, to stop him. To understand him.

  On that first morning after the world had changed, I came down to the kitchen, alone. I’d been afraid that I might disturb Ella, that my restlessness might penetrate her fragile sleep. Oblivion was impossible for me, besides which I felt the need to be awake, to guard my wife, to be alert to any further threat.

  I had become aware – also sometime around four in the morning – that I had something urgent to do, something that I needed to finish before my wife woke. That knowledge had come to me as a shock, like an extra-loud heartbeat, out of the silent darkness of the bedroom. But once it had gripped me, I was unable to close my eyes again. I waited until Ella’s breathing had steadied, and I judged that she was safely asleep.

  I made my way, as soundlessly as I could, out of the bedroom and down the stairs. I opened the door that led from the kitchen to the back garden and made my way across the decking – some of the worn boards now treacherous with dew – to the lawn. Ignoring the crazy-paved pathway, I took the short cut and hurried across the grass to the gravel driveway. I could feel the morning moisture soaking its way through my inadequate slippers, but I didn’t care. I didn’t stop. The double garage loomed up at me, as though only now taking shape: emerging out of the darkness into the creeping dawn light, fully formed.