I wondered if they would have been my friends if he was alive, or if they’d have only been his. If things hadn’t changed, if Jack was still alive and Mum was like before and I was the old me, acting up and mouthing off and looking out for nobody, not even myself, I doubt they would have known me. I wouldn’t have known me.
Bee would have nodded at me in the corridor because I was her boyfriend’s little sister. Harper would have walked past me in the street maybe, that’s all. We might have noticed each other and we might not have.
And here they were, feeling to me like they were pretty much all I had in the world. I told myself that some families we get without asking, while others we choose. And I chose those two.
I think that’s what you’d call a silver lining.
“Some week,” Harper said, and he put his arm around me and drew me toward him.
“Things get bad and then they get better, right?” said Bee. She was curled up in a big green armchair, her arms around her knees, her hair washed and combed and golden.
I nodded. “Just when you think they’re never going to.”
We were quiet for a bit then, comfortably quiet, all together. Sonny and Stroma were giggling furiously in the kitchen and the sound of them made us smile, like it was contagious.
“I was thinking of making something for your mum and dad,” Bee said.
“What sort of something?”
“Well, for all of you, really. Like a book. Some of my photos. Some pictures of Jack.”
I thought about my Jack picture hiding under the bed, Bee’s Jack picture, the picture that started it all. How greedy I was not to share it.
“Do you think it would be OK?” Bee said. “Do you think they’d want it?”
I said I thought it was a great idea. I said I could help. I said, “They should meet you anyway, when things calm down a bit. Or now even. I don’t know.”
Bee focused on me really hard for a second and then she looked up at the ceiling.
“You don’t have to meet them,” I said. “If it’s a bad idea…”
“No, it’s not that. I’m just—there’s something else,” she said. “I have to give them something else. I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
“Is it private?” Harper said. “Should I go?”
Bee looked at me. “That’s up to Rowan.”
“God, no,” I said, leaning into him. I was thinking, What else could she possibly have up her sleeve? What else could she be hiding?
“What is it, Bee?”
She shifted in her seat. She pulled something out from underneath her. More photos. She looked at them and then back at me.
“I don’t know how to say it so I’m going to show you these.” Her hands shook when she passed them to me.
Baby pictures. Newborn baby pictures. A baby wrapped in a blanket so tight you could hardly see its face. A baby sleeping and wrinkled and impossibly small. And Bee, looking younger and wiped out and happy. Bee staring at the baby and smiling. Bee kissing its tiny hand. Bee sitting up in bed with the baby in her arms.
“Is that Sonny?” I said.
“Yeah, it’s him.”
“I don’t get it,” I said, looking up at her, the idea closing in on me from behind.
“Sonny’s not my brother, Rowan,” Bee said. “He’s my son.”
The room seemed to shrink around me while I listened to her. I was staring at the pictures. Harper put his arms around my waist and held on.
“He’s mine and Jack’s.”
Twenty-one
When Jack died, Bee was two months pregnant. She didn’t know it yet.
When he went away and never came back, he’d already left a part of himself behind. A cell constantly dividing, a mathematical miracle, a son.
She never went back to her old school. She took time off, anyway, so she could stop crying. She didn’t want people talking about her; she didn’t want to be looked at or pitied or despised. The fifteen-year-old who should’ve known better and was messing up her life.
Bee said it didn’t feel like that to her. She was scared and everything—scared to tell Carl and scared of being a mum and scared of what was happening to her body. She said, “I always wondered what I would do if I got pregnant, like my mum did with me, way too young and all over the place. I wondered if I’d keep it. But when it was Jack’s and Jack was gone, it felt like he hadn’t left me with nothing. I felt like I wasn’t alone.”
Harper said, “It’s amazing. I can’t believe how amazing it is.”
I was waiting for Sonny to come into the room. I was wondering which parts of him were my brother. I was watching the doorway and I was trying to take everything in and I could feel this thing, like a gathering snowball, in the center of my body. Hope and excitement and an ending that wasn’t final.
“Did Jack know?” I said.
Bee shook her head, studied her hands. “No, he didn’t.”
She said my name and I looked at her. She said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“I should have told you. Our families should have known together. If I could go back, things would be different.”
“If we could do that, Jack would still be here.”
“I know.”
“You did OK, Bee,” I said, and I was crying, but I wasn’t sad. I hugged her. “You did more than OK.”
Carl came in the room then with Sonny and sat him on Bee’s lap. “Thanks, Dad,” she said, and she smiled at him and he winked.
He put his hand on my shoulder. “You all right, Rowan? Are you taking all this in?”
I nodded and smiled and wiped my face on my sleeve. Sonny was drinking a bottle of milk. He played with his hair, his eyes slowly closing and then struggling to open, his lashes thick and dark like Jack’s, his golden skin like Bee’s. I reached out and stroked his soft and honeyed arm.
“Hey, Sonny,” I said.
Stroma walked in then and stopped in the middle of the room like she’d forgotten something. “Why’s everyone so quiet?” she said.
Everyone looked at me. “We’re thinking,” I said.
I was still stroking Sonny. He looked at me over his bottle and smiled. A little milk leaked out of the side of his mouth and trickled down his cheek toward his ear.
“Thinking about what?” Stroma asked. Then she saw the pictures in my lap and said, “Ooh, babies. Is this me?”
“No,” Bee said. “It’s Sonny.”
“That’s who we’re thinking about,” I said.
Stroma looked through the pictures. She said, “Why do very little babies look like old people?”
Carl laughed. “What do you mean?”
“All screwed up and grumpy and stuff.”
Bee said it was because they’d just been woken up after a long sleep.
Stroma looked at her for a minute. Then she said, “Why is there a picture of you there instead of Sonny’s mum?”
The room was so quiet I could hear the air bubbles popping inside Sonny’s bottle. Bee looked at me.
“Tell her,” I said.
“Tell me what?”
“I am Sonny’s mum,” Bee said.
Stroma put her hand over her mouth and I could see all these thoughts making shadows in her eyes, like she was trying to add up too many numbers at once.
I held out my hand to Stroma and she took it and came to sit in my lap. She was thrown. She was trying to work things out.
“Do you want to know who Sonny’s dad is?” Bee said.
“Is it a secret?”
“Yes.”
“Then yes, I do.”
Bee and I spoke at the same time. We said his name exactly together: “Jack.”
I had no idea what Stroma was thinking. She put her thumb in her mouth and frowned at a place in the air just in front of her. I tried to look around at her face, but she just kept staring.
I put my mouth to her ear and I said, “Do you want to hear something funny?”
S
he nodded, but she didn’t take her eyes off Bee and Sonny.
“You and me are aunts,” I said. “You’re Auntie Stroma.”
She looked at me like I had no grasp on reality, like she had no idea where to start. “I can’t be an auntie. I’m six.”
Harper laughed and rested his head on my shoulder from behind. “And your mom and dad are a granny and grandpa.”
“Are you OK?” I asked her, rubbing her leg with my hand.
She looked at Carl. “If Jack was here, he’d be in big trouble.”
“He’d be a dad,” Carl said.
“That’s weird,” she said, wrinkling up her nose.
Sonny finished his milk and climbed backward off Bee’s chair. He started dancing to no music on the rug. “Am I still allowed to play with him?” Stroma asked, getting to her feet.
“Of course you are,” Bee told her.
“More than ever,” I said.
Later, Harper and I sat at the kitchen table with the lights off and the candles burning down. Everyone was asleep. Stroma and Sonny were sleeping with Bee in her bed. Harper held my hand, traced the lines in my palm. I couldn’t switch my thoughts off. I was racing.
“When are you going to tell your folks?” he said.
“I’ll tell my dad first,” I said. “I’ll tell my dad and then he can decide what to do next.”
He smiled at me and said something like, “You mean you’re not doing this alone?”
I pulled a face at him. “Do you think it will make them happy like it’s made us?”
“I hope so.”
“I want it to make everything better.”
“Your mum’s got nothing right now. Nothing that’s working. This is like a gift.”
“Do you think they’ll see it that way?”
“I think Bee and your brother are about to change everything.”
“I’m scared they won’t,” I said. “What if Mum and Dad are all judgmental and weird? What if they don’t like her? Or don’t believe her?”
“Don’t be scared. Don’t think like that. You worry too much.”
I looked at him in the guttering light and smiled. “Where would I be without you?”
“You’d be fine.”
“No I wouldn’t.”
He stretched out his arms and yawned and got up off his chair. He started clearing the table. “Do you want to sleep in the ambulance with me?” he said. “We’ve never done that.”
“Where shall we go?”
“Wherever you want.”
“Let’s go to seventy-one Market Road,” I said.
“You serious?”
“Yep. I like that place a whole lot more than I used to.”
We left a note. We said we’d be back first thing. We parked up in the little turning where I’d seen him that day. We drew the curtains and made the bed. I found a book of pictures on a shelf, photos of Harper’s family, of his mum and dad and of him, younger and smaller and just the same.
I sat under the blanket and looked at them. Harper was watching me. “What?” I said.
“I never expected you.”
“What does that mean?”
“I picked something up and I gave it back, and that was supposed to be it. I was going to be in Madrid now, or Dublin. Somewhere.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be crazy. I met you and I didn’t want to go. That’s what I mean. I wasn’t expecting that.”
“Thanks,” I said, because it made me feel so good.
He laughed. “You’re welcome.”
I said, “I’m glad Bee dropped it and I’m glad you gave it to me. That one little picture changed everything.”
I thought about Bee waiting all that time to tell me, not knowing how to do it. I thought how strange it was, looking back at it, how scared she’d been to share something good. I said, “Poor Bee. She must have been dying to tell someone.”
Harper was still looking at me, but he was quiet for too long. “I still have to go, Rowan.”
“Where?”
“Wherever I’m going.”
“Are you leaving?”
“I wanted to see all these things and travel. It’s my dream. I need to do it.”
“Can’t I come?”
“You know I’d love that, but you’ve got to stay here. You’ve got to stick around for this one, haven’t you?”
I nodded. “And then what?”
“I need to go home and see my folks and tell my ma to stop worrying and…family, you know?”
“You’re my family,” I said. “It feels like you are.”
“So I am. And I love you for saying it. And I’ll come back.”
“No you won’t,” I said. I got this picture of him in my head, on the move, warm in the sun, everything new, the picture of me in his own head fading to nothing.
“Don’t say that,” he said. “That’s not fair. I’m not lying to you.”
I said, “When are you going?”
“In a week. Maybe two. I’ve got to make myself do it.”
“I can’t believe I’m not going to see you,” I said.
“Look,” he said, “I can’t believe I met you, and you are so young and so much older than me. I can’t believe I feel the way about you that I do. From the day you didn’t want to take the negative out of my hands. You messed up my travel plans from the beginning.”
“It’s why you shouldn’t go,” I told him. “It’s why I don’t want you to.”
He was quiet for a minute. He was thinking. “The way I see it, Rowan, we know something already we’re kind of too young to know,” he said. “That’s all. We’ve got more time to enjoy it. Does that make sense to you?”
“Jack and Bee didn’t,” I said.
“We’re not Jack and Bee.”
“I just want to be with you,” I said. “I don’t mean to make this harder.”
“I have to go,” he said. “For a while, a few months. I’ll write. We’ll talk on the phone. I’m not leaving you. I won’t do that.”
“OK,” I said. “OK.”
“I’m sorry, Rowan.” He got up and sat close to me on the bed. He put his arm around me and I leaned into him and shut my eyes. “I’m coming back,” he said. “I promise you.”
“You better.”
I looked into the dark center of his eyes and I thought about him being gone and how things might be when he got back.
I thought about Bee and me and no more secrets and how much I loved her.
I thought about Sonny, about what Bee and Jack had given to us without any of us knowing.
I thought about Mum and Dad.
I thought about Mum looking at us when we told her. I imagined her arms held out to Sonny, her hands on his skin. I thought about her telling herself Jack wasn’t all gone, not quite.
I thought about her coming back, just a little, just in time.
I thought about us being a family again. Not just Mum and Dad and me and Stroma, but Bee and Sonny and Carl and Harper as well. I thought about us all together, at birthdays and picnics and long Sunday lunches.
I thought about Bee in Jack’s room, touching each thing, feeling the trace of him on her hands. I thought about her sleeping in his bed and wearing his clothes and looking in his books for secret things he’d left behind.
I thought about taking it apart, the Jack Clark museum, and sharing his things because he didn’t need them anymore. I thought about having a proper room, breathing life into it, and nobody minding.
I thought about us going, all of us, our two joined families, to Jack’s lake. Rowing to the island, soaking up the sun, burning our feet on the rocks, swimming in the water that took him. Seeing for ourselves what a beautiful place he left from, what a perfect day he’d been having.
I thought about seeing Harper again after not seeing him. About how that would be.
I looked at his face and I committed it to memory absolutely, and I said, “If I’ve done all right up to now, the next part is going to be ea
sy.”
Acknowledgments
Thank you thank you thank you to
Veronique Baxter
Laura West
Stella Paskins
Gillie Russell
Adam and Adele for
the Map of the Universe
and Alex
About the Author
Jenny Valentine worked in a food shop for fifteen years, where she met many extraordinary people and sold more organic bread than there are words in her first book. She studied English literature at Goldsmith’s College, which almost made her stop reading but not quite. Her debut novel, ME, THE MISSING, AND THE DEAD, won the prestigious Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize in the UK under the title FINDING VIOLET PARK. Jenny is married to a singer/songwriter and has two children. She lives in Hay on Wye, England.
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Also by Jenny Valentine
ME, THE MISSING, AND THE DEAD
Credits
Jacket photo © 2009 by Brand X Photography/Veer
Jacket design by Alison Klapthor
Copyright
BROKEN SOUP. Copyright © 2009 by Jenny Valentine. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition March 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-192309-8
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