After Forever Ends

by Melodie Ramone

  Moments later, Sandra left off with her older brother for their home in Ireland. Lance had left off with his mother for their estate North in Caernarfon. Alexander left off with his parents for the family home in Welshpool and Oliver and I took one last walk around the lake together in silence. We looked at the little gamekeeper's cottage that had been our temporary home, at the tree we sat under when he had kissed me for the first time, and the spot on the bank where we would hang out with our little group of friends and laugh until we ached. Neither of us said a word. Then we walked across the grounds to the bench where we had first met.

  “I want to take this with me,” Oliver said quietly, patting its surface. “Maybe I’ll steal it.”

  “It’s made of stone. We couldn’t lift it.”

  “Yes, but Professor Wilkins took the rubber ball from Lance when Merlyn broke a window with it and wouldn‘t return it, remember?”

  I nodded, “You lose a ball and you can’t have a bench. But you ended up with me.”

  He wrapped his arm around me, “Just Silvia, who’s not hurt or ticked off, but just fine.” We watched a butterfly flutter past and land on the grass, “What would it have been like here without you?”

  “You’d have had loads of girlfriends.”

  “Like who?”

  “Oh, like Peggy McGhee!”

  “Who? Oh, her. Yes. I mean no. Definitely not her.” He was looking straight ahead.

  “Serena McLaughlin then.”

  Oliver snorted. “Try another!”

  “Amber Monahan.”

  “No way! She‘s revolting!”

  “Well, you could have had the half of the female students that Alex didn’t,” I squeezed his arm, “Or the two you might have exchanged if it wasn’t a good fit. Wait! Would that be twincest?”

  I watched the dimple appear in his cheek as Oliver smiled and shook his head, “Gargoyles, ninety-five percent of them. I wouldn’t have wanted any one of them and none of them would have been clever enough to get me through Physics.”

  “I didn’t help! You nicked the password to Professor McClellan’s computer, picked the lock on her office and changed your mark yourself! And maybe you wouldn’t have wanted to keep any of those girls, but they’d have wanted to keep you.”

  “So? You practically wrote my essay once!” He looked up into the sky, “I’d have been miserable here without you!” He paused, “Well, maybe I’d have gotten an urge to go to Edinburgh then. Maybe I’d have gone and seen a beautiful red haired goddess on a bench and beamed her straight in the back of the head with a rubber ball just so I could meet her.”

  “You did that on purpose?”

  He looked at me with the devil in his grin, “No, but it would have been brilliant, yeah?”

  I lay my head against his arm. We were quiet for a long moment. “So it’s good bye to Bennington now and off to our little house in the wood.”

  “Oh, I’ll make it big. I’ll make a mansion out of it for you.”

  “I don’t want a big house.”

  “Really?”

  “No, just a couple of rooms.”

  “A toilet with a window?”

  “Up high, sure,” I squeezed him again, happily imagining it, “Nothing we can’t manage. Just something where we can go at night and be warm and eat fat sausages and bacon and toast in the morning. Of course, running water would be nice.”

  “A room for us and a room for a muffin or two?” He nudged me.

  “Oh, yes, definitely, but we’ll worry about the muffins as they come. They can always share a room for a while if they have to. Lucy and I did.”

  “I really do think you are absolutely the most fabulous person in the world, Sil.” He looked at me seriously, “Marry me again?”

  “As many times as you ask, Sweetheart.”

  “Then I’ll keep asking.”

  “Good.”

  We sat there awhile longer before we both knew that it was simply time to leave the place and everybody in it behind. Both of us sighed, taking one last glance around. How special Bennington was, really. Despite its constraints, it had been a sort of magical place for us. Oliver had spent a good amount of time growing up there, but I tell you this for nothing. That is that I was born there. I said it in the beginning that I swear my life began the day I walked through those gates and I wasn't joking. I certainly would not have grown to be the woman I did had I never set foot on that quad or sat on that bench that morning to check my schedule. It is so amazing the way such a simple act can launch the direction of your destiny. One just never knows, do they?

  As we were exiting the quad, Headmistress Pennyweather came scurrying across it, “Ah, the young Dickinson’s! I was hoping to find you!” She was all smiles, her hair tucked up under a grey fedora, “Lovely day, is it not?”

  “Yes, ma’am, lovely,” Oliver told her.

  “Well, since the term is over and you two are no longer students, there is something I have wanted very much to give to you,” She reached into her pocket and pulled out an envelope, “It is from not only me, but some of the other faculty. We could not formally present you with a wedding gift while you were enrolled here, but now that you’ve graduated we all wanted to wish you well.”

  “Thank you,” I told her as she thrust it into my hand, “I don’t know what to say!”

  She grinned, looking between the two of us for a moment, “Don’t say a thing at all, Silvia. Just use it well and wisely. And remember these words from an old lady…life can be cruel and at times can be downright ugly, but as long as you remember what you saw when you first knew you loved each other and keep finding it over and over again, there is nothing that you can’t get through together. Not a single thing!” She took a sharp breath, “Now, Mister Dickinson, may I give you a hug as a good bye?” She stood on her tiptoes to embrace him and patted him lovingly on the back, “Hopefully not a forever one, I’d like to see you again. Please do keep your brother in line,” She released him and turned to me, “And one for you, Missus Dickinson, who shall forever be Miss Cotton in my mind…I still can’t get past it,” She laughed, giving me a tight squeeze. “Come back and visit an old lady once or twice! Or give me a ring and let me know how it is going with you two! Now, go on! Get on with your lives! And make them happy ones, too!” She looked at her watch, “I’ve got a plane to catch! I’m spending the first part of my holiday in Monte Carlo!” And with that, she scuttled off and disappeared into the halls of Bennington.

  “She’s an angel,” Oliver grinned as he took my hand and began to walk with me toward the gate.

  “You really do fancy her, don’t you?” I asked him seriously. He didn’t respond, but kept looking at the school. I slit open the envelope with my finger and opened it, drawing out the card, “Oh my!”

  “What is it?”

  “Remember when she said that what she doesn’t see herself someone always tells her?”

  “Yep.”

  “It’s a certificate for lumber from a yard from the staff, like she said. Wow, a lot of them signed the card! And there’s a business card with a note. Oh, my goodness!”

  “What?”

  “Professor Walker’s son’s a bloody plumber and he’ll do the house at a discount!” I grinned, waving the paper, “I always knew I was his favourite!”

  “Yeah, he’s sweet on you. Lots of blokes are, even the Profs. Dirty minded old buzzard he is, if you ask me. You probably didn’t even need to take an exam in his class to pass, yeah?” Oliver turned to me, and then looked back at the school with a deep, longing sigh, “I understand that completely, believe me. You bring that out in a man. But I do know now what I would have done if you hadn’t come to Bennington. I would have gotten past the age difference and I would have run off with that brilliant, beautiful old lady, Headmistress Pennyweather, and I’d have made her my own!”

  “No,” I put my arm through his, “Because I’d have had an urge to come to Wales first and I’d have beamed you in the back of a head with a rubber
ball. You’d have had no choice but to abandon your feelings for her and run away with me.”

  “You know what? You’re right.”

  “I’m always right.”

  Oliver laughed and pulled me to his side, “That’s why I married you!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The train is coming to a stop. I am suddenly snapped back into the moment and glance away from the window. I had not been aware I had been staring out of it at all. Kitty has one hand on her chin, leaning forward with her elbow on the table, and the other wrapped around a can of cola.

  “She was the one you called my mother after, wasn’t she? Your headmistress?”

  I nod. “She was a kind lady. She was one of those people who come into your life for a short time, but leave a profound effect on your soul.”

  “She was a romantic, no doubt.”

  “It was your granddad she shined on more than me. If she were thirty years younger, I’d have had some competition because he was right stuck on her. But she looked after Alexander, too. She was firm with him, but she protected him. Madame Pennyweather loved those boys and everybody knew it. After she passed on, Sandy told me that our Headmistress had birthed twin sons herself. One had died at shortly after birth and the other only lived to be about five years old. It was a birth defect, both she and her husband were carriers of a rare gene, and there was a three in four chance if she ever had another child it would have the same affliction. She never tried for more. I can’t say that I blame her,” I sigh, thinking of my old Headmistress and how if I could I’d love to pop into Bennington and see her still sitting at her desk, “It was why she became a teacher instead. She taught little ones before she took the position of Headmistress at Bennington.”

  “That’s very sad,” Kitty says sincerely.

  “Losing a child is the worst thing you can imagine, Kitty. It’s a nightmare you live with every day for the rest of your life. Even if the child dies before you got the chance to bond with it, every once in a while you’ll wake up thinking of it in the night.” I stop speaking and press my fingers against my temples. I don’t want the conversation to go where it’s heading and so I make sure I return to the former subject, “When I found out Madame Pennyweather’s given name was Carolina, I thought it was the most beautiful name I’d ever heard. Carolina Montez was the name she was born with. I’d had no idea she was from Brazil. I really should have taken the time to know more about her when she was alive, but I doubt she would have told me much. Anyway, your granddad and I changed the spelling of your mum’s name so that people wouldn’t mispronounce it. Carolena. I just love that name.”

  Kitty watches a few people pass by heading for the exit doors.

  “Are we getting off here?” I ask. I’m confused for a second and then embarrassed when I realize we’re not stopped at Welshpool Station. I’ve been to Welshpool Station a million times. I hope Kitty doesn’t think anything of it.

  It’s obvious she doesn’t realize I’ve just had a lost moment. “No, Gran. Not yet.”

  “Am I talking too much? I’m losing track of what I’m saying,” I rub my forehead. I have a slight headache, “I’m getting old. I think I just blabber on. I don’t know what I’ve told you. I hope I haven’t embarrassed you.”

  “No,” She answers in the same voice, “I love that you’re telling me. It makes me feel special that you’d share it with me.”

  “Sometimes I think parents consider their children’s history to be part of theirs…like a continuation. And they think of their grandchildren as perpetual infants. I think we forget that when it comes down to it we are all a shadow of those who follow. You should know your shadow. How old are you now, Dear?”

  “I’ll be thirty-three in September.”

  “You don’t look a day over twenty.”

  She laughs, “I wish!” Then she smiles at a vendor and helps a little girl pass between chairs. “Do you want to tell me more?”

  “I think I can go on,” I absently fiddle with my wedding ring. I have never taken it off in all the years I’ve had it longer than to wash a dish or have a bath. “Where was I?”

  “You left Bennington,”

  “OK, OK. We left Bennington. Now what came next?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It had been four years since we’d left Bennington College. Oliver and I were twenty-one that spring, completing our degrees at university, both working, and completely settled into the cabin by then. We’d worked our tails off since we’d moved in making it a right and proper home. By the start of that first summer the twins had finally managed to get the walls up around the room that would be the toilet with the window up high. With the discount that Professor Walker’s son had given us, we had the well tapped and working plumbing installed. He jokingly asked us if we wanted the tub left in the front room, but we opted to move it to the new toilet instead. I picked out this beautiful little porcelain sink that looked like a shell and Oliver bought an oval shaped mirror to go above it. We’d felt it was quite an accomplishment. To us it was another testimony that there was nothing we couldn’t do.

  “Unbelievable,” Oliver stood in the middle of the room with Alex, “We managed to finish one whole project. You ready to start the next now?”

  “I’m ready to start drinking whiskey,” Alexander replied. “But the room is nice.”

  “I think we’ve learned enough to get the next up more quickly.”

  “Oh, you think that, do you?”

  “Oh aye!” Oliver turned to his brother, “At least I learned enough from my mistakes if you didn’t! I used the phone and asked for help! Dad and our cousins, Mike, Dennis and Artie, and Uncle Ian and Great Uncle Jack are going to come help us on the weekends!”

  “You are the clever one, Oliver!” He put his hand on his brother’s shoulder.

  “Tell me about it!” Ollie sounded very satisfied as he returned the gesture.

  “Well,” Alex said quickly after a moment of silence, “Let's go get pissed then.”

  “OK.”

  With the extra help from Oliver’s family and Lance, who came down to visit whenever he could, we had two bedrooms and a kitchen with a larger wood burning stove to cook on by the time the second snow fell. We called Professor Walker’s son in once again to set us up with plumbing in our kitchen. It worked very well each year until December when the pipes would freeze and we were back to boiling pots of water on the stoves. We redid all the floors with new oak and had new windows cut and installed. The house was still small, but really quite lovely.

  Alexander was so fascinated with the process of adding on to the cabin that he changed his direction at university from engineering to architecture. Devising and building structures had become his passion and he was talented with it. By request, he designed and built a tree house for the mayor’s children. It sat proudly in a great oak in the man’s front garden and demanded attention from passers-by, particularly because of its Northern tower and the spiral steps leading up to it that wrapped around the tree. It wasn’t long before Alexander was sought out to make more. He earned loads of money on the side customizing tree houses and play houses for people’s children. He loved it, too. I never saw Alex as happy or satisfied as when he was sitting with his drawing pencils in front of graph paper or when he was standing near a pile of timber and steel.

  It was such a busy point in time, those four years. Oliver and I had full time jobs, both of us, as well as being full time students at Cardiff. Oliver still worked as he always had at the mill loading bags of flour into the back of trucks, only now he was a manager and was making better money. I had gotten a position just off the university campus at a cafe as a server until I finished my Biology degree. I then went off to work part time at a hospital, spinning blood in test tubes and scraping cack on to slides in search of parasites. It was better pay, but it was boring. Oliver and I tried to set our schedules as close to each other as we could, but it was more or less impossible. We didn’t see much of each other and life was becomi
ng less and less fun.

  Still, we were so happy when we were together. We must have been completely mental. It’s hysterical. There we were living in the middle of nowhere, still in a minuscule little house. We had no electricity at all and no running water in the winter, plus it took half the spring for our pipes to regain water pressure and they never did decide whether to give us hot or cold and water when it rained hard enough. I did have a fantastic garden, though. I found I had a knack for keeping it, and we’d managed to afford two decent cars, using part of Oliver’s trust, that could make it up the path to the cabin even in the worst weather. And we had each other, best of all.

  Oliver and I would still go into town and use our mobile phones to keep in touch with people since we couldn’t get a signal at the house. We were too far out to have telephone lines, so a home phone was out of the question. I rang Sandra as often as I could to see how she was doing and Lucy, too, on the days she could receive calls at Bennington. Lucy was sixteen now. She’d matured into a young lady with her own notions. Headstrong and independent, she had gotten over her anxiety about being at school without all of us and had fallen into a groove of her own. Lucy, from what I had gathered, had taken over the campus and was back to doing anything she could to avoid actually learning anything. Bless her heart, she couldn’t seem to be serious about anything but worrying about Alexander.

  “How is he?” She’d ask, “I only talked to him a minute about a week ago. He sounded a bit boggled. Have him ring me, right? I miss you all so much. I know you‘re busy, but you should get Xander and come and visit.”