Mike,
People are still coming, and I try to listen, and I try to talk, but I can’t seem to. Especially since the snowdrops. Mel is so good. She’s like a sort of filter; she sits next to me and touches my hand when she thinks there’s something I might want to listen to, and the rest of the time I just look at the wall. Everyone says such lovely things about you.
Sometimes I wish everyone would go away and leave me alone, but then the thought of being alone is too much. Which is stupid, stupid, because I am alone, alone, alone all the time, because you’re not here, and you should be. You should be. You know that, don’t you?
Blake says Kate still doesn’t remember anything after going into the water. Mel said, “Has anyone tried turning her upside down and shaking her until the memories come out? Because if they haven’t, I will.” Blake said, “Sometimes these things take time.” I said, “Mel, accidents happen. We of all people should know that, after what happened to Mum. Tires blow out.” “Yes,” she said. “I’ve never understood how you were so accepting of that either.”
I didn’t say anything else to her, but I’m not accepting anything, here. Some days I can’t bear not knowing. And then some days I couldn’t care less, because it’s not as though her remembering anything else is going to bring you back.
But I don’t accept that you’re not here, Mike. And I think—I know—you should come back. I can’t believe you won’t. This was never in the plan.
Come back. Come back to me. I don’t care how. I’ll wait. Because I can’t, won’t, don’t want to be living my life—our life—without you. I absolutely refuse.
I’ve pressed the snowdrops in our wedding album. And I’m waiting.
E xxx
It’s hard to know what to do on Michael’s birthday. Mel tells Elizabeth that next year she will be able to remember her husband and find happiness in those memories. Elizabeth agrees but doesn’t really believe her, in the same way that she doesn’t really believe that she’s in the air when she’s on a plane: it seems too impossible, too ridiculous, and looking down and seeing clouds only makes it all the more unlikely, somehow.
Patricia brings her photograph albums around.
Elizabeth hesitates before looking, but can see nothing in the chubby boy with the curly hair that she can relate to her husband. Until Patricia turns a page and there he is, only nine, eyes looking straight into the camera, mouth a solemn line. “I remember that year,” Patricia says. “It rained and we had to have his party indoors, and so we couldn’t have races. He wasn’t very pleased.” And everything the man will be sings out from the boy, and suddenly Elizabeth is gasping, gasping at how vivid he has become.
“I thought it might be too much,” Mel says to Patricia as she holds Elizabeth’s hand, Mel’s other hand rubbing a rhythm up and down her sister’s spine. Elizabeth’s eyes are closed, her body shaking. Her head has dropped and it’s impossible to see whether she is crying or not. There’s no sound, but Patricia and Mel know that this means nothing.
“She’s going to have to start making an effort, Mel,” Patricia says in a half whisper that would carry through a stone wall. “Look at me. I’ve lost my son and I’m still going to the WI tomorrow. I don’t much care about spring jams at the moment, but I have to keep going.”
Like so much she tries to say to or about Elizabeth, it doesn’t come out quite the way she means it to. If Patricia had more parts of her heart that weren’t aching, if the constant battling back of the desire to give up and lie down would just stop for a minute or two, she thinks she could work it out. Somewhere in the air around her drifts the understanding that the generations grieve differently, in the same ways that they love differently, dress differently, raise their children differently. Close by is the feeling that if she could cry for help the way that Elizabeth does, by letting all of the desperate wordlessness out of her, then she would. But Patricia will do what she has always done: manage. She can tolerate enough sympathy to make her feel as though she isn’t alone, but not so much that she can’t take care of other people. When friends touch her arm, she smiles and nods. If she thinks anyone might try an embrace, she takes a step back. When people ask her how she is, she shakes her head but says she’s bearing up.
Patricia would never tell you about her baby sister who died, because she never speaks about it. It’s no secret: Patricia was five, little Sheila only two. She would never tell you, because she never thinks of the way that her mother gave herself over to her grief, becoming a shadow mother, ineffectual, incapable, insubstantial. She never thinks of it, but the memory is everywhere within her. And even though Elizabeth has no children—even though, in this house, there is no five-year-old being woken in the night by the strange, sad sound of muffled crying—she wants to save her from her mother’s fate. She wants to do it with the kindness and the gentleness that, if she was the wishing sort, she would have wished for her five-year-old self.
But she can’t do it. And when she tries, she says something that she shouldn’t, and she could bite out her own tongue. In her heart she is saying, Seeing my friends, having them touch my arm and say kind things will make me remember that I’m not as monstrously alone as I think I am. Taking home a recipe will mean that on one of these mornings when I wake up and I don’t know quite how I’m going to make the day go by, I’ll get out my jars and take the last of the elderberries from last autumn out of the freezer, and there’ll be something to fill up the time, and there’ll be a jar of warm jelly to take to a friend, and that’s the only way I can do it.
Elizabeth pauses for a moment and Mel looks at Patricia as if to say, Well, here it comes, but nothing happens. Or rather, nothing happens outside Elizabeth. Inside, she thinks about making an effort—about lifting her head and explaining her world to her mother-in-law, who she knows doesn’t have a cruel bone in her body, not really, but that doesn’t stop the things she says from sounding cruel, at a time when Elizabeth has nothing with which to protect herself from even unmeant cruelty. She thinks about how much of an effort every day is, that sometimes she feels as though she’s going to have to reach into her own guts and move her own diaphragm up and down because her lungs can’t find the strength to fill and empty, or her heart to pump and pull.
Instead, she says, “I think I’ll have a lie down,” and she goes upstairs and puts on her husband’s sweater and waits for enough strength to get up again.
• • •
Andy, Blake, and Mel have discussed the protocol for tonight and come up with a simple strategy for what should have been Michael’s day: they will follow Elizabeth’s lead. So when she comes downstairs, showered, hair brushed, and with the palest of smiles, Blake opens wine, Andy makes much of his allergy to dogs—Blake has brought Hope with him, and two dogs seem like one too many for the doctor as he sneezes and blows—and Mel begins some cautious reminiscing.
It’s the closest thing to normal, or what any of them remember as normal, that there’s been in the five weeks since Michael died. Elizabeth is unpredictable—sometimes present, sometimes worlds away, as quickly as if she is being switched on and off—but she is herself too, hand gestures and smiles breaking through the encrusted grief as if to remind her companions that she’s in there, still, and might come out one day.
Every now and then she remembers that she will have to have her own birthday without Mike this year, and the next, and the next. Grief stacks itself up, waiting.
It’s after eleven o’clock when the very-definitely-not-a-birthday-party breaks up. Mel walks home with Blake, taking Pepper, she says, “to give him some air.”
The sound that comes from Elizabeth shocks them all with its strangeness. She’s laughing. It’s a rusty half laugh, but a laugh none the less.
“To give yourself the chance to smoke all the way home, you mean,” she says. “I hear what you call Pepper when you think I’m asleep.”
• • •
; As soon as Blake, Mel, and the dogs have gone, Elizabeth looks straight at Andy and asks the question she’s sworn she doesn’t want to know the answer to. Except that, after a drink and a loosening of the fear that binds her, it’s all she can think about.
“What would it have been like,” she asks, “for Mike?”
His expression tells her that he hasn’t understood, and so she has the chance to back up and off this path, but she doesn’t.
She just takes a deep breath—diaphragm up, diaphragm down—and says some words she doesn’t want to have to use so close to one another. “Mike. That night. I keep wondering, Andy. What would it have been like? To drown?”
“Oh.” Andy looks into his glass, and into Elizabeth’s face—her eyes are alert, concentrating, sure—and takes a deep breath too. And he tells her, gently, calmly, simply, the way he knows he should.
Tears roll down her face and gather in his eyes but he keeps going. What he says is part medical opinion and part thirty years of friendship.
He says that, once the shock of the cold was over, Michael probably wouldn’t have felt much.
He says that Michael would have been so focused on getting Kate out that he wouldn’t have been thinking about his own body.
He says that physical strength and the instinct to save both himself and Kate would have taken over.
He says that the weight of Michael’s own wet clothes and the weight of Kate and her wet clothes would have been a huge burden.
He says that Michael would have struggled but there would have come a point when he couldn’t struggle anymore.
He pauses and looks at Elizabeth, touches her arm, a question: Is this enough? She nods. Keep going. I’m OK. Her eyes say, Despite appearances, this is OK. Her heart screams for him to stop talking, but something stronger in her needs to hear this.
He says, “Michael probably lost consciousness.” He says—he falters as he says it—“He might not have known. About the dying. We can’t know.”
“No,” says Elizabeth. “No. We can’t know.”
Later, in the dark, knowing how well Mel sleeps after a drink, she takes a blanket and sits on the stairs, listening to Mike’s voice on the answering machine, over and over and over until it’s a beloved white noise. She’s consented to the machine being switched off, so that unwary callers don’t have to hear her husband’s voice, but she won’t have the recording replaced. As she said to Mel the last time they talked about it, it’s not as though she isn’t here to answer the phone. Mel had made a face that said, Well, I’ll let this go for now, but this isn’t the end of it.
Andy’s words have been partly reassuring: she likes knowing that Mike wouldn’t have known, wouldn’t have been thinking about dying, would instead have been focused on getting Kate out, getting himself out. But the conversation has also reminded Elizabeth of what she’ll never know.
She wonders how he felt, what he thought about, whether he panicked or was calm, whether he thought about her. She goes upstairs and gets into bed and holds her breath, just to see if she can discover how it might have felt, but something more primal even than grief makes her pant and panic before she gets anywhere close.
Mike,
This morning, by the gate, it was a few crocuses—crocii?—tied with a silver ribbon again. I was out there early—it was barely light—but you’d beaten me to it. I felt as though, if I’d been fifteen seconds earlier, I’d have seen you disappearing around the side of the gate (or through the fence, or dematerializing, or however you do it). It seemed as though the air was still reassembling itself around the place where you’d been.
I put them in our bedroom, on my bedside table. I opened the curtains, a little bit, so that they would get some light, although I know it doesn’t really matter once they’re picked. Thank you for bringing them for me, today, of all days, when I’ve lain awake all night and thought about drowning.
I keep telling Mel she can go home, and she says yes, or she could stay here, because she can work anywhere she can plug her laptop in, and I’m a little bit glad, really, although I’m probably being selfish. Mel’s the only person here who has a history with me that isn’t also with you, so she isn’t an automatic reminder. Not that I forget.
I’m making no sense. It’s partly because I’m not sleeping, which makes the whole world slightly overexposed. But also because yesterday, you were supposed to get older, but you didn’t, and now that’s something else that’s wrong.
I looked at your photo in the morning, and I wanted to wish you happy birthday, and then I didn’t, and then I couldn’t work out the tense—“It is, was, would be, could have been your birthday.” In the end, I said, “Happy birthday, my darling, precious Mike, who brought me to this cold, damp, twisty-turny little place and made it my home.” I said it because I’d found something to say that made perfect sense, whether you were alive or not. I said it to your picture, but if you’d been here, I would have said it to your sleepy, bristly, another-year-older face.
I miss you. I love you. I’m here. I’d rather be there, where you are. Wherever there is. But you know that, because it was always that way.
E xxx
Although Blake has been very clear with the Micklethwaites, telling them that they can call him any time, for any reason, and that he’ll help them in any way he can, Richenda has shied away from doing so. She blames her mother—she blames her mother for a lot, actually, one way or another—whose cry of “I’d rather die than take handouts from the state” had made for a long, cold, bleak childhood and a horror of taking any kind of help from any kind of institution.
As she dials Blake’s number, she blames herself a little too, for her absurd idea that her family would be able to get through this time by relying on one another when, in reality, it’s been years since they’ve had so much as a fully civil and convivial mealtime.
Blake arranges to come that afternoon, which gives Richenda enough time to calm down and feel a little foolish for making the call. She plans for coffee and questions about that poor policeman’s widow.
But there’s something about his face, as honest as the sky, demanding honesty in return. So when he asks her how she is, how things are, she tells him. She tells him in a headlong jumble. The dog, who at least has Kate leaving the house but knocks the bin over several times a day and trails rubbish everywhere, and no one seems to find it galling except her. Rufus slotting back into life as it was before this as though nothing much has happened, while she feels as though everything is tilting. The pictures in the local paper of that poor policeman’s funeral, and his mother and his widow. Kate, hardly eating and vomiting and refusing to talk and how she’d looked up bulimia on the Internet and felt sick herself, all those girls destroying themselves as they tried to wrest control of something, and how she doesn’t know where shock and trauma stop being a reasonable, understandable reaction and start being something else. How glad she feels that Kate is here, how terrible that Michael Gray is not. (She makes herself say his name, Blake notes, in the same way that Elizabeth carefully forms the words Kate Micklethwaite, although Patricia can only bring herself to spit “that girl,” and rebukes her daughter-in-law for caring. Although only, Blake has noticed, when Mel is out of earshot.) The worry that having someone die in the process of saving you is a huge burden to bear, at any age, and because she is so young, relatively untouched by difficulty, Kate has no strategies for this.
“She has you,” Blake says, his first opportunity to say anything at all since sitting down. “Don’t underestimate that.”
“Yes,” Richenda replies, instantly underestimating it, “but she won’t talk to me, or can’t, and there’s something different about her that I can’t quite put my finger on. She’s sleeping all the time and I don’t know if that’s good or bad. She still doesn’t say much about what happened and I don’t know what to think about that—should I be relieved, should I be worried? I wo
nder, if she did talk, would it be better, or worse…” She tails off, wiping her eyes.
“Right,” Blake says. “I don’t have any answers, but I can give you one piece of advice.” Richenda looks straight at him, eyes darkened from blue to gray by the tears and the fading of the late afternoon light. “Don’t worry about what you can’t control. You can’t make Kate talk and you don’t know what will happen when, or if, she does. So put that out of your mind.”
A retort is on the tip of Richenda’s tongue—how easy those words are to say, how impossible to do—when she thinks about all of the times she’s locked the front door at night, knowing that Rufus isn’t coming in, knowing what he’s doing and, sometimes, where he’s doing it and who with, and choosing not to think about those things. She takes a deep breath, exhales, thinks about smiling and, although she can’t quite manage it, Blake sees that the storm has passed.
• • •
The trouble is, Richenda thinks later—apart from her marriage and Kate and the poor dead policeman—that she is working from home more, and being around for Kate more, she has more uninterrupted thinking time. Although her job, as a freelance bookkeeper, is easy to do from home, she’s always preferred to sit in other people’s offices, seeing how they work and getting a sense of lives other than her own. Since Kate’s accident, she’s been going out for a couple of hours to collect paperwork and spending the rest of the week in her beautiful, stifling house. Kate, whom she aches to care for, is mostly sleeping or going on long rambles with Beatle, who seems to be the only companion she will tolerate.
When Richenda hears Kate crying and goes to her room, she is sent away, not unkindly—“I just want to be on my own, Mum”—and so she sits in the office next door to Kate’s bedroom and puts her head against the wall. She stares at the signed Beatles poster, one of Rufus’s most treasured possessions, and waits for the sobbing to stop. And she wonders. She wonders where, when it could have been different.
The Secrets We Keep Page 6
