by Julie Cohen
‘Doc!’ he called as soon as they were within hailing distance. ‘We’d call it a favour if you could come ashore with me right now.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Robbie asked.
‘Dottie Philbrick, at the general store. She’s about to have her baby. We’re waiting for the ambulance, but you looked closer.’
Robbie took the helm. Emily scrambled over the side of the boat and into the launch. ‘Meet me there!’ she called to him, and then Little Sterling was motoring away, towards the town dock.
‘You let the guy who forgets everything take care of the boat?’ Robbie said, but without urgency. He didn’t need any memory to wrap up the sails, to catch the mooring line, make everything fast, jump into the dinghy. He followed the launch, arriving not long after Little Sterling and Emily disappeared into the general store.
When he got inside, everything was already happening. Dottie Philbrick was standing behind the deli counter, leaning on it, bent over at the waist. Her skirt was pushed up and Emily was examining her. She moaned loudly, and Emily smoothed her back. Several people were standing around, watching in shock. Fortunately most of what was going on was hidden by the high glass case filled with cold cuts and cheese.
‘She was about to make me a tuna melt,’ said Susan Woodruff, clutching her handbag, ‘and she suddenly looked all surprised. And then she shouted that the baby was coming, and George offered to take her up to Pen Bay in his car, and she shouted that the baby was really coming so I called 911, but then Little Sterling saw you coming in.’
‘I told you, everyone,’ said Emily, hurrying to the sink at the back of the deli counter to wash her hands, ‘get the hell out of here and let this woman have her baby in peace. When the ambulance arrives, send them in.’
‘You heard what the lady said,’ said Robbie. ‘C’mon outside. The doctor will holler for us if she needs us.’ He began to shepherd the bystanders out of the store.
‘Not you,’ said Emily. ‘I need you, Robbie. Do they sell beach towels out at the back? I could use a couple.’
‘By the sunglasses,’ said Dottie, and groaned loudly as a contraction hit her.
‘Hurry,’ Emily told him, and Robbie went to grab some beach towels off the shelf. He handed them over the deli counter to Emily and stood back a little, keeping his eyes trained on a shelf of home-made preserves, a lot of them made by Dottie and her mom Sarah. He listened as Emily reassured Dottie and coached her along.
Remember this, he told himself. Remember how proud of her you are right now. Remember how everyone here trusts her. Remember how you would do anything for her. Don’t forget.
‘That’s it,’ said Emily. ‘That’s it, you’re doing exactly right, the baby’s nearly here, Dottie. She’s coming much more easily than you did, if I recall. One more push, and—’
He heard a liquid sound that he didn’t want to think too much about, and a baby’s cry.
The sound did something to him. Hooked him in the gut. Outside, he heard applause. When he glanced over the deli counter, Dottie was on the floor and Emily was handing her the baby, wrapped in a blue and yellow beach towel. The look on Dottie’s face. He’d seen that exact same look on Emily’s, when she first held Adam.
Don’t forget don’t forget don’t forget.
He wanted to grab Emily and hold her as tightly as he could. He wanted to seize this moment, this now, before the fog rolled in, and make it last forever. He wanted to feel the weight of all their shared past, everything they had done and felt and told the truth about and lied.
All the lies had only been to preserve the truth. He had to remember that as well.
There was a noise from the doorway: the paramedics. Emily spoke a few quick words to them and then she came round to Robbie. ‘Wasn’t that amazing?’ she said. ‘A healthy baby girl in eleven minutes flat.’ She had a wild, exhilarated look on her face and Robbie pulled her into his arms.
‘I’m all covered with blood and amniotic fluid,’ she protested, but she wrapped her arms around his waist and leaned her head against his chest.
‘It always begins again, doesn’t it?’ he murmured to her. ‘New babies. New life.’
‘Adam,’ she whispered. ‘Adam, and his children. We need to protect them, Robbie.’
He smoothed his hands over her hair. Remember this. Don’t forget.
‘You can be my memory,’ he said.
Emily drove. Emily did most of the driving, now, and when he drove himself, he knew she was worrying about him, that he’d forget where he was going, or forget to look both ways before pulling out into a junction, and although he thought it would be some time before he forgot how to drive a good old-fashioned truck, it was a real possibility that he could get lost, even in this area where they’d lived for so many years. He kept misplacing things in his workshop: reaching for a hammer that wasn’t there, or finding an awl where he expected a screwdriver. Sometimes he thought he was back at the boatyard in Miami and he’d stand in the middle of the garage, staring at unfamiliar objects, wondering how the big work bay had become so small.
He thought for now, though, that he would be all right to drive around here. But Emily worried, and so he let her drive him, even to the store, and definitely further afield like to Adam’s house in Thomaston. His brain was misfiring and it was better to be safe. It was as dangerous as being drunk. Even more.
He’d had a dream in the early hours of this morning. A full-bodied, immersive dream: he was hot, awash with sweat and dirt and other people’s fear, and his ears were filled with the motor of the patrol boat as it churned up the Mekong River. The water was a sheet of flat brown, the jungle every colour of green. An insect alighted on his cheek and he swiped it off with his shoulder. Fear, and cordite, and defoliant, and cigarette smoke, and the taste in his mouth that never went away, never enough no matter how much alcohol he sipped and downed, and the familiar breathing of Benny and Ace on either side of him, and there was a flash and then a pause, a long pause like the end of the world, and then the crash and the screams.
He woke up with the scream silent and digging into his throat and he was in the darkness and he thought he must be in the hospital with his eyes covered and then he felt that Emily’s arm was around his waist. It was Emily and she was here. She wasn’t lost, and he wasn’t torn.
He’d wiped the sweat from his forehead on the sheet and held her closer to him until his heartbeat calmed. In the morning he still remembered the dream as vividly as when he’d had it, and his hands shook as he poured the coffee, but she didn’t notice, or if she did, she didn’t ask.
The past was a double-edged sword. It inflicted wounds, and the wounds you didn’t talk about festered. They grew inside you and they waited to spill out.
Adam barbecued chicken on the grill and Shelley had made a pasta salad and the younger couple drank beer and he and Emily drank iced tea. The kids played some sort of complicated game involving a ball, a Hula hoop, and a dozen flags until the sun went down and Adam got the two younger ones to bed, and Chloe went upstairs with her laptop to do whatever pre-teens did with their laptops. It was so peaceful and so normal and Robbie found himself doing what he kept doing these days: pressing his lips together and telling himself to remember, to remember, to keep it all inside and never let it go.
Telling himself he had to do whatever it took to keep this alive.
And then Shelley made coffee, and Adam opened two more bottles of beer, and they sat in the living room and Adam said, ‘What is it, Mom and Dad?’
He let Emily do the talking, as she’d done the driving. She held his hand. He watched Adam’s gaze go from Emily to him and back to Emily, the way he’d looked at them both when he’d been a child and there was a storm coming and he wanted reassurance that the lightning wouldn’t hit them.
‘But we’ve got years, yet,’ Emily was saying. ‘There are things we can do to try to slow it, and you kn
ow your father is a fighter. And we are going to do everything together.’
‘We’ll help,’ said Shelley immediately.
‘But Dad,’ said Adam, and it was funny how you could see the past in the faces of your children, how their younger selves were overlaid on their older selves so you were both surprised and not surprised to see them grown.
Emily had been right, the other day. Adam was sure in his skin. He was one of those kids who carried the fact that he was loved with him everywhere he went, and it protected him. That was the gift he and Emily had given him, he supposed. And Robbie could see that gift more clearly now, because Adam’s face was blank with grief in a way that it had never been before.
And he saw what Emily had meant. If they took away Adam’s sense of himself, they might end up taking that gift back from him, too. He might learn to doubt their love for him. And with that gone, Adam might start to doubt everything.
‘I’ll be fine, son,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind relying on your mother. I’ve been relying on her since the day I met her. She’s a good person to rely on.’
He meant what he said, but he heard the ring of untruth in his own voice as he spoke it. You could talk and talk and talk sometimes, and speak the truth the whole time, and never get to the truth at all.
Robbie wasn’t sure when he’d made the decision: only that it was sometime in the bright spaces between forgetting. Maybe it was this morning, waking up from the dream of fear and death; maybe it was here, right now, in the safety of his family.
He thought, though, that he’d made it before. Maybe he’d made the decision and forgotten it and made it all over again.
He almost hoped that was it, because if he decided the same thing over and over again, then it had to be the right decision. Like Emily’s hand in his.
‘You can rely on all of us,’ said Shelley firmly. ‘We’ll all do whatever we can. Do you want us to let William know?’
‘We’ll tell him,’ said Emily.
‘Dad,’ said Adam again. Robbie stood up and Adam stood up too and they hugged. Adam was a little taller than he was. Robbie closed his eyes. Remember, remember.
‘You’ll need to take care of her for me,’ he murmured into his son’s ear. He felt his son nod and he felt Emily behind them, watching them, and without looking he knew she had tears in her eyes.
Without looking, he knew he had made the right decision.
Remember. It never ends.
Chapter Six
September 2016
Clyde Bay, Maine
Emily was dreaming about a crowd. She was rushing through it, pulling a heavy, clumsy suitcase behind her, bumping into people. She had to get a train, it was about to leave and she was going to miss it and she couldn’t find the platform, she’d forgotten the tickets. Heavy voices boomed from the tannoy, announcing departures and arrivals in words she couldn’t understand. It sounded like English, but all the words were blurred together.
She felt lips on her cheek. The scent of roses. A gentle kiss. Robbie’s voice.
‘I’d never have forgotten you.’
There he was, standing on the platform, wearing his denim jacket, rucksack over his shoulder, a smile on his face. And everything was starting from here. From right now, this moment, and it was all going to be all right.
She reached out her hand for him and he was gone.
Emily opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was the rose, pink and yellow. There was a note underneath.
She smiled and sat up. He said he was no poet, but she had all the letters he’d written her since they’d been together. Birthday cards, Valentines, little notes he left on her bedside table for her to find when she woke up.
And then there were the letters from before: the letters he wrote to her from Italy and on board the Nora Mae. That first note he’d ever written her, left on the bedside table in the hotel in Lowestoft. She’d destroyed all of those, but she still remembered every word in them.
Emily opened the letter. She read it, stock-still in bed, the dawn light filtering pink and gold through the open window.
Then she pushed herself out of bed and ran, barefoot and stumbling in her nightgown, through their house, down the stairs, out the front door and across the wet lawn, seeing his footprints in the dew. Left minutes ago. Across the road and on to the black and grey rocks, pain lancing up from her feet. She slipped and fell and barked her knee and forced herself up again, old legs frustrating and slow, because she saw his shoes on a high rock. His shoes and his shirt and his trousers, carefully folded and dry.
Not like this, not all at once, not forever. Please, no.
And the sun was up now and the sea was empty and vast before her and kept on crashing, landing and splashing on the shore as she called out his name, over and over again, without stopping.
PART TWO
1990
Chapter Seven
March 1990
Clyde Bay, Maine
She had been looking for it for so long that when it arrived, she hardly realised it was there. It had slipped between the pages of DownEast magazine, and when she was walking back from collecting the post from their mailbox at the end of the drive, hurrying because it was cold and she hadn’t put a coat on, her boots crunching on the ice and salt, the envelope slipped out and fell to the ground. She scooped it up without looking at it, automatically turned it over, and stopped dead still in the drive.
The card was heavy, good quality, and the address was written in fountain pen. The name on it was Dr Emily Greaves, and even if she hadn’t recognised the handwriting, she would have known by the fact of her maiden name.
A flake of snow fluttered down and landed on the envelope, and then another. Emily’s breath came out in clouds and she stared at the envelope. The handwriting had a shake to it. The person who wrote it would be nearly eighty: retired, spending his time in the garden and with his books, walking around the village as he always had, speaking to everyone he met, asking about their health and their families.
Emily felt a wave of homesickness so strong that she nearly slipped on the ice underfoot.
She tucked the other mail underneath her arm and carried the envelope into the house. Belladonna, their black Lab, met her at the door with her lead in her mouth.
‘Not now, Bella,’ she said, dropping an absent caress on the top of her head and taking the envelope into the kitchen. Adam was at soccer practice, due back any time now; he’d left a peanut-butter smeared knife and crumbs on the counter from his snack this morning. Robbie was in his workshop in the garage. The sound of the radio reached her faintly.
She sat at the table and opened the letter. The handwriting alone took her back to afternoons visiting the surgery as a little girl. Looking at the notes he wrote to himself, things to remember to do, lists of patients, his signature on the prescription pad. The surgery always smelled of antiseptic and the roll of flimsy paper they used to cover the examination table, which he kept behind a silk screen embroidered with nightingales. It smelled of his pipe tobacco and his receptionist, Hilda’s, perfume. Emily lifted the letter to her nose to try to catch the scent of tobacco, but there was none there. Perhaps he didn’t smoke a pipe any more. Most people had given up smoking.
Eighteen years. A lot could happen in eighteen years.
Dear Emily, began the letter, and Emily’s eyes filled with tears, to see her own name next to the word ‘dear’.
‘Mom? Are you all right?’
Adam was in the doorway, wearing his soccer kit. His dark blond hair fell in a fringe straight into his eyes. Emily liked it best this way, when it was too long and it needed a haircut, though it drove Adam crazy.
‘I’ve had a letter,’ she said. For a second she considered hiding the letter, but then she put it on the kitchen table in front of her. ‘It’s from your grandfather.’
He put down his
sports bag. ‘The one in England?’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t know he writes to you.’
‘He doesn’t.’
‘Is that why you never talk about him?’
She bit her lip. ‘I didn’t . . . I thought you assumed that you didn’t have any grandparents.’
Adam pulled out the chair next to hers. ‘Everyone has grandparents. I thought maybe they were dead, like Dad’s mom and dad.’
He said it in a matter-of-fact way and Emily swallowed. ‘Sometimes I don’t talk about things that hurt,’ she said. ‘It’s easier not to think about them.’
‘But if they’re not dead, why does it hurt? And why haven’t we ever seen them?’
Adam’s eyes were blue, sometimes bright enough blue to dazzle her when she caught a glimpse of them. At fourteen, he was a bundle of potential: quick, bright, fast on his feet, with a temper that melted away as soon as it was roused. Everyone said how much he was like his parents: clever like his mother, cheerful like his father, with Emily’s light hair and eyes and Robbie’s manner of feeling comfortable in himself.
‘I write to them every year,’ she told him. ‘That’s why they knew where to write to me now.’
‘So they know about me?’ Adam frowned, and Emily reached over and hugged him.
‘Sometimes people just have to stay distant,’ she said. ‘It has nothing to do with you, sweetheart. Nothing at all.’
‘Don’t they want to meet me?’
‘If they knew you, they would love you. Nearly as much as I do.’ She held him tight. She knew, one day, that her son would be too old to be held and squeezed. Her friends’ children had mostly grown out of it by now; they flinched when their parents tried to kiss them at the school gates. But Adam had always been a cuddler. Even now, in the evenings, a newly minted teenager, he would fold up his long skinny limbs and curl up on her lap to watch television with her.
