Together

by Julie Cohen

  ‘Anyone would love you,’ she told him.

  ‘Do they have any other grandchildren?’

  ‘I don’t know. My sister may have had children by now.’

  ‘I could have cousins that I don’t even know.’

  ‘How . . . would you feel about that?’ she asked him carefully.

  She watched him think about it. ‘It would be weird?’ he said at last. ‘But maybe nice? If I got to meet them one day.’

  ‘I don’t know, Adam.’

  ‘What’s the letter about?’

  ‘Aren’t you hungry after your practice? I can make you a sandwich.’

  ‘I’d rather know what the letter is about.’

  She nodded, but she let him go and turned her chair slightly so that Adam could not see the writing in the letter. She picked it up again and read.

  Dear Emily,

  It has been many years, but I think it is only fair that I should tell you.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘What is it, Mom? Is it good news? Are they going to come and visit us?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, nothing like that. My mother has died.’

  ‘He doesn’t say how,’ she said to Robbie, later, in front of the wood stove in the living room. She had a glass of red wine, and he had a glass of iced water. Even in the dead of winter, he liked his drinks very cold. ‘He’s a doctor. You’d think he’d say how my mother died.’

  Robbie had been reading over the letter. ‘He doesn’t say much at all. Then again, you can’t pack that much information in three lines.’

  ‘Eighteen years,’ she said. ‘I still remember the last time I saw him and my mother.’

  Robbie had been there. She didn’t need to explain. He took her hand and squeezed it.

  ‘You tried,’ he said. ‘But they might have made the best decision. Considering everything. I don’t know if we could have been as happy together if there hadn’t been a clean break – some things are better forgotten.’

  ‘But I never saw her again, and now she’s dead. When I said goodbye, I didn’t think it was going to be forever.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart.’

  She sighed and leaned against him. ‘You said your own goodbyes too. We both made the choice. But I didn’t . . . she was only sixty-eight.’

  ‘Your father must be in his seventies.’

  She nodded. ‘And Polly is forty-two. My little sister.’

  ‘And Adam is fourteen.’

  ‘He wanted to know if he had cousins. He said he would like to meet them.’

  Robbie exhaled, slow and long.

  ‘Remember when he was six and had an imaginary brother?’ Emily said. ‘And called him William?’

  ‘I didn’t think he actually minded, though. Being, for all practical purposes, an only child.’

  ‘I used to imagine I had a little sister, before Polly came along. Every child has an imaginary sibling at some point or another. Even if his wasn’t entirely imaginary.’

  ‘I didn’t have one,’ said Robbie. ‘But he’s got a better imagination than I ever did.’

  ‘He’s thought about my family in England. He’s wondered about them. Maybe I should have told him something.’

  ‘What could you have told him?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something.’ She took the letter from Robbie’s lap and smoothed it between her fingers. ‘Why do you think my father told me? He didn’t have to.’

  ‘He says he thought you should know.’

  ‘But why?’ She turned over the letter, as if looking for more writing on the back of it, more than the three scanty lines on the front. ‘Does he want to see me again? Does he want to connect in some way?’

  ‘He doesn’t say that.’

  ‘But does he?’

  ‘I think,’ Robbie said carefully, ‘that you shouldn’t read more into the letter than is there.’

  She traced over the signature with her finger. Yours sincerely, James Greaves. ‘He would have thought about how he signed it. About how distant to be. You met my father; he’s one of the most courteous and social men I’ve ever known. But he would have been careful. He’d say less than he meant, not more.’

  ‘So you’ll write back?’

  ‘I’ll try to call him, tomorrow after work. I don’t know if he’ll speak to me. I don’t even know if they have the same phone number as they used to.’ She leaned her head against Robbie’s shoulder and twisted her ring around her finger. Two clasped hands, a circle complete with only two. Round and round in a circle, self-contained, forever.

  Self-contained and complete. But how many people did that circle exclude?

  Her last appointment of the day was an postnatal patient, a young woman, with her first baby. She was a single mother – one of the things that had changed the most in Emily’s practice since the 1970s was how routine it had become to see single mothers. The shame was gone – and thank God for that.

  Delivery had been tricky; the baby had come too quickly and there had been some tearing. She examined her patient while the baby fretted in a carrier on the floor.

  ‘How are you feeling in yourself?’ she asked, already writing her notes in her head: healing as expected, all normal, advised to finish the course of antibiotics and painkillers, no reason for follow-up visit.

  ‘I’m all right,’ said the woman. Her name was Sarah. Emily smiled at her, a practised smile of professional reassurance, and left her to put her clothes back on. She checked the clock: it was three, which was eight in the evening in England. Her father would be making a cup of tea, reading a book. Maybe he had the radio on to keep him company. Radio 4, voices, so the house would not seem so empty.

  Her parents had been married for forty-seven years. What would it be like to live a lifetime with a person and then, suddenly, to find they had gone?

  There would be a space in the house. A blank where that person should have been. You would look up to say something, something normal and boring, an offer of tea or a comment on the weather, and that person would not be there to hear.

  The baby grizzled. Her patient emerged from behind the screen and sat gingerly in the chair, rocking the carrier with her foot.

  ‘Are you getting any sleep?’ Emily asked, finishing up her notes. They’d put in a new computer system for patient records and as far as she could tell, it was about three hundred per cent less efficient than old-fashioned paper. She pressed ‘Save’ and an hourglass appeared on the screen.

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Well, that’s normal I’d say.’ She smiled again at Sarah, and Sarah smiled back. There were dark circles under her eyes. Emily glanced at her records to try to see Sarah’s family circumstances, but the screen had gone blank while the system tried its best to save a few simple lines of text. If it went down again, tomorrow was going to be a nightmare. She clicked the mouse in irritation, and the baby wailed, and Sarah rocked her more quickly with her foot.

  ‘Don’t try to do too much during the day,’ Emily said. ‘Sleep when the baby sleeps, that’s the trick. Is there anyone who can come and sit with her while you get a nap?’

  Sarah shook her head. ‘No, I’ll be OK.’

  ‘Don’t be afraid to accept help. You’re a new mother, and you’re healing. You should take all the help that’s offered, and if none is offered, don’t be afraid to ask. What about your mother, is she close?’

  It was the standard advice she offered, but Sarah flinched at it and for the first time Emily noticed how thin the other woman was. Her belly was still slightly distended from the pregnancy, but her arms were skinny, poking out of the sleeves of her woollen sweater.

  ‘My mom died last year,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Oh.’

  Emily must have looked stricken, because Sarah’s eyes widened. ‘It’s OK,’ she said quickly, ‘it’s all right; it
’s just that she loved babies. She was wicked good with babies. People called her the baby whisperer. She could take any baby, and make it stop crying within like a second.’

  The baby was full-out crying now, red-faced. Sarah stood and took the carrier in her arms, rocking it back and forth.

  ‘Well, that sounds like a very useful talent to have,’ said Emily.

  ‘Especially in the middle of the night, right?’ Sarah laughed nervously over the sound of the infant. ‘Anyway, is that all?’

  ‘Just keep taking your antibiotics until they’re all gone, and if you think you’re not healing properly, don’t hesitate to make another appointment.’

  ‘OK. I will. Thanks, doctor.’ She picked up the baby and left, and Emily turned back to her computer, stabbing the ‘return’ key. The machine started to make a whirring sound.

  There were times, in the middle of the night, when Emily had wanted her own mother. Adam had been an easy baby, on the whole, but every baby had wakeful nights; every baby got a fever. She recalled one night when he had been hot, inconsolable. Robbie and she had taken turns walking him around the house, holding him, crooning, rocking, soothing. Nothing had worked. His hands were little fists, his face a constant scream. Finally, she had sent Robbie to bed to catch some sleep before work while she circled the house singing every lullaby she could remember. He’d stopped crying as the sun came up. When she touched his face it was cool. Adam fell asleep in her arms and outside the windows the sun was coming up over the bay. Over the ocean that stretched eastward all the way to the country where her own mother was at that very moment. The water that separated them and connected them.

  She’d thought of the photographs of herself as an infant in her mother’s arms. There was one in a silver frame in her parents’ house, on a table with several other photographs of Emily as a young child, her sister Polly as a baby and toddler. In the photograph, her mother’s hair was swept up into a chignon; she wore a white blouse with a lace-edged collar, and she held the sleeping Emily wrapped in a crocheted blanket. Emily remembered the blanket. It had been pink. She somehow remembered the texture and scent of her mother’s blouse in that photograph, too, though that was surely impossible and she had made it up because of the picture.

  She’d hardly looked at that photo when she was living with her parents. It was part of the landscape, the million details of her childhood home that made it up and were too important to be noticed. But holding her own child in the same way her own mother had held her, she thought of that photograph and she wondered if it still stood on that polished mahogany table. Or if it had been taken away, put away. If all the photographs of her had been put away.

  The PC beeped and shut itself off. Yvette, the receptionist, knocked and poked her head through the door, looking harried. ‘Sorry, Dr Brandon, sorry, there’s a system problem again, I’m about to get them on the phone.’

  ‘Can you hold off for a little while, Yvette? I’ve got a call to make.’

  ‘That’s fine, it’ll give me a chance to think up a list of really good swear words.’ She disappeared.

  Emily lifted the phone, pressed 9 for an outside line, and began to dial. 011 for overseas, 44 for England, and then the number she knew from when she’d been a child, a young woman, ringing from the payphone booth at the end of the corridor of her college in Cambridge. She didn’t even have to think about it; her finger found the numbers by itself, even though she had not dialled them for eighteen years.

  But she hesitated over the final button.

  What if her father didn’t answer? What if he did answer and immediately put the telephone down? What if she only got a snatch of his voice, and it sounded sad and alone and she could not speak with him?

  Emily put down the phone. She sat for a moment, thinking. Then she took out the phone book from the drawer of her desk and looked up the number for International Information. Five minutes later, she had another number with the same beginning. The phone rang twice on the other end, and then was answered by a man with a voice she didn’t recognise, but an accent so familiar it made her eyes water.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry to bother you so late at home, vicar, and I don’t think we’ve met, but I wondered if you could tell me when the funeral will be for Mrs Charlotte Greaves?’

  Chapter Eight

  Robbie stopped off at the Clyde Bay General Store for a cup of coffee before he even got to the boatyard – the owner, Perry, made pretty bad coffee, but it was the only place open this time of morning, and besides, Robbie liked shooting the shit with the old guys who always hung around the store every morning eating home-made doughnuts from the tray on the counter. In the summer they sat on the bench outside, and as soon as it got cold they picked up the bench and put it inside, next to the old wood stove in the centre of the store. Retired lobstermen, all of them, who’d never got out of the habit of getting up before sunrise, even when they were too old to haul pots. They were good for a few minutes’ banter about last night’s Celtics game. In the summer, it was the Red Sox, and in the autumn, the Patriots. Time around here was measured by sports teams and the weather, everything in an endless cycle.

  ‘What do you figure our chances for the playoff?’ said Isaac Peck, before giving an exaggerated comic double take and adding, ‘Oh that’s right, Brandon, you’re Cleveland Cavaliers. I forgot you’re a flatlander.’

  It was rendered flatlandah, in the broad Downeast accent.

  ‘Isaac,’ said Robbie, ‘you’ve been forgetting I’m a flatlander every morning for the past ten years at least.’

  ‘Not on Christmas or Thanksgiving,’ Isaac said phlegmatically. ‘On them days I stay home and look at my family instead of your ugly face.’

  Perry filled his travel mug with coffee and Robbie drank half a cup, scalding hot, before holding it out for a refill.

  ‘You need the buzz this morning?’ Avery Lunt asked, shifting his skinny backside on the wooden stool.

  ‘Drove Emily down to Boston last night for her plane. Didn’t get back home till two and figured there was no point going to bed.’ And he wouldn’t have been able to sleep without her, anyway. The bed was too empty, her side too cold and smooth. He had not been apart from her at night for a very long time.

  ‘Ayuh, she going back home to Limeyland for a visit?’

  ‘This is home,’ said Robbie. ‘How long do we have to live here, anyway, before you stop calling me a flatlander and my wife a Limey?’

  The lobstermen and Perry exchanged glances. ‘Give it another thirty years,’ said Avery at last.

  ‘Are you going to be right here in thirty years, Avery?’ Robbie guessed that Avery Lunt was seventy-five if he was a day, though as he had the leather face of someone who’d spent every day of his life on the ocean, he could be anything up to a hundred and ten.

  ‘Plan to be.’

  ‘Thirty years probably isn’t long enough though,’ said Isaac, considering. ‘You still got that accent for a start. Your boy, he might make a real Mainer.’

  Re-yul Mainah. They said it as if it was the pinnacle of achievement, and Robbie, to be honest, couldn’t disagree. From the minute he’d set eyes on the Maine coast he’d felt it was his: the rocky shore with its intricate crenulations, the way the pine trees spiked up from the land. The islands crouching in the sea like hunched porcupines, countless – some of them inhabited, some no more than seal-strewn rocks. The old white lighthouses, the dead calm fog, the raw power of a Nor’easter. Right now, though the calendar said it was early spring, the water was still a slate grey, almost black at times, whipped into ice crystals, and the snow lay thick on the shore.

  ‘I hope he will,’ Robbie said. ‘He already refuses to believe that any team exists except for the Red Sox.’

  ‘Good boy.’

  Sterling Ames put down his half-chewed doughnut and spoke for the first time. He had powdered sugar on his grey moustac
he. ‘Where you from again, Bob?’

  ‘Ohio, with a detour via the south as far up as Maryland.’

  ‘Ever see the ocean before you grew up?’

  ‘Not until I was sixteen, and then I was hooked. I fell in love at first sight twice in my life, and that was the first time.’

  ‘You got any relatives in these parts?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because Little was down Camden on the weekend, got talking to some fella called Brandon in the Rusty Scupper.’

  Robbie’s hand tightened on his plastic mug. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Said he looked just like you, ’cept twenty-five years younger. Little came back with a head on him like a sore grizzly, ’cording to his father.’ Sterling took another bite of doughnut, scattering powdered sugar.

  ‘There are a lot of Brandons around,’ said Robbie.

  ‘Boat builder, this one. He’s been working over there for Harkers.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Robbie, his heart pounding as if he’d just sprinted a mile at full pelt. ‘Well, got to get to work. It’s been a pleasure being abused by you guys, as always.’

  ‘Get the hell to work,’ said Avery. ‘Stop bothering us old folk, we got stuff to take care of.’

  Brandon’s Boatyard was only about five miles from Clyde Bay General Store, off Route 1 and down a twisting access road to the coast, which was lined with snowbanks from October to April. Gravel crunched under the tyres of his truck but Robbie wasn’t listening to that or to the 1960s oldies station that was pumping from the radio. He was thinking about how he wanted to go home and see Emily: to tell her about this, to try to work out what it might mean. To feel the touch of her hand on the back of his neck, see the furrow between her eyebrows as she thought.

  But Emily was most of the way across the Atlantic by now. She was reading her book, or fast asleep, or most likely, looking out the window at the clouds over England and thinking about who she would meet there and what they would say. Maybe she was thinking about him, too. They hadn’t been parted from each other for more than a night, for years.