by Helen Fisher
Henry dispelled my reverie, returning with a cotton bag that clinked and handing it to Jeanie. “Jam,” he said, as she opened the handles and peered inside, “and some homemade bread, and there’s some of Em’s scones in there too.”
“What’s this?” Jeanie said, pulling a bottle of something a little way out of the bag.
“Crème de menthe,” Em said. “We don’t need it, I don’t even know why we’ve got it, just thought you might like it.”
“Em and Henry always give us lots of treats,” said Jeanie to me, raising an eyebrow.
“We worry about you, love, that’s all,” said Em.
“We’re very grateful,” said Jeanie. “But I don’t know how I’m going to get through that crème de menthe on my own.”
“Maybe it could go into a recipe, mint creams or something?” suggested Em.
“I’ll put it to good use, don’t worry,” said Jeanie with a wink in my direction. She seemed to feel a connection with me, merely because we were the closest pair—age-wise—in the room. I could see she thought of Henry and Em as old, and wanted to distance herself from them; be in a gang with me.
“Faye’s interviewed us about bowling. She was asking us about what there is for people to do round here,” Henry said.
“Nothing is the easy answer to that,” said Jeanie, looking pointedly at me. “All we can do is go to the park, or play in the garden. You got kids?”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded. Your grandchildren, I thought.
“Then you know, there’s nothing to do. Unless you’re like Em and Henry, older and got no kids, then it’s bowling, and what else, Henry? Darts, right? If you’re rich, there’s golf.”
“Gardening,” said Henry.
“Crosswords,” said Em.
“Oh, please!” Jeanie said, laughing at them good-naturedly. And they took it well.
“One day when you’re as old as we are, you’ll love those things,” said Henry, smiling indulgently at her.
“Never!” She drained her cup. “I’m sorry, but we really can’t stay, we just wanted to return some of your jars,” said Jeanie, standing up.
Em looked disappointed. But Henry put his hand on her shoulder, and went to give Jeanie a hug.
“I really need to go too,” I said, determined to stick with my mother. “Thanks for everything.” I shook Henry’s hand, and Em’s. “I’ll let you know when it’s going to be in the paper,” I added, holding my notes in the air.
“Which way are you?” Jeanie asked as we neared the end of the path leading from Em and Henry’s door.
I waited until we all turned left and said, “Same way as you.”
* * *
IT WAS MIDMORNING and the sun was weak as we walked slowly in the direction of Jeanie’s house. Little Faye got out her paddle and ball again and ambled dreamily a few paces behind us, trying to get a rally of consecutive bounces going. I could hear her counting but was tuned in to my mother’s patter about Em and Henry. Jeanie swung the bag languorously, the weight of it giving a satisfying long arc as she strolled. I almost wondered if she would let it go at the height of its curve. I heard a rumble of traffic in the distance, and started to feel uncomfortable that I couldn’t see little Faye all the time. If it were my children, I would be holding their hands, or at least have them within grabbing distance at all times, and so I found myself turning to look at my younger self frequently, and certainly whenever I heard a car.
As we rounded a corner, I turned and walked backward, my eyes fixed on my younger self’s bobbing mess of curls. The small red ball hit the paddle and shot upward; her eyes were on it, and so were mine. She missed, and the ball hit the pavement and the corner of a small rock, which sent it springing up in an unexpected direction. It was like a tiny meteor flying peacefully through space, only to collide with another meteor with a silent boom and fly off peacefully in a direction it had never considered. Little Faye reached out for the ball, but it glanced off her hand, sending it in yet another curious trajectory, at the mercy of the universe. Toward the road.
The little girl—little me—stepped casually into the street to follow the ball. But at that moment I heard the sudden roar of an engine as a car rounded the corner, looming behind the child and heading straight for her. I gasped as time lurched from a peaceful slow-motion to a raggedly rapid full-speed at the flick of some switch. I lunged toward the child and threw myself at her. Car, me, child, in that order collided in the cosmos, but the greatest impact was not me with the car, which only clipped my hip, but me with the road. Child in my arms, the sounds I could hear were the short squeal of brakes and the screaming of a woman.
But actually, it was the screaming of two women, and one of them was me. The road had cut like hungry teeth through my sweater and into my flesh, leaving a deep graze up my left arm and grit embedded in my face where my head had slowed my skid along the abrasive surface. Plus I had an instinctive and powerful grip on this six-year-old child, a grip I was making with a wrist that hurt like hell.
“Oh my God oh my God thank you thank you thank you,” exclaimed my mother, as she flung herself upon us and peeled back my arms to see her child, cocooned and safe within, eyes wide like a small animal.
“Are you all right, baby?” my mother said.
“I think so,” I said, assuming in the moment that she was talking to me.
“She smells like you,” said my younger self, and I knew it was the sweater I’d taken, which smelled of my mother’s perfume.
A man was standing over us: the driver. His shadow moved around a bit and there were apologies and the smell of smoke, and the twisting of a foot stamping out a cigarette butt on the road; apart from that I wasn’t particularly conscious of him. I couldn’t see him, I only had eyes for my mother. He drove away.
“You saved her life,” my mother said, her words like a rush of wind. “And you’re hurt.” She gazed deep into my eyes with gratitude and concern; her fingers gently brushed over my forehead and cheek, and I could barely feel the pain when I compared it to the wonder of her touch. I almost forgot how to breathe. She held out her hand to help me up and—stunned—I let her heave me to my feet.
“I think you better come with us, my place must be closer than yours. You’re not in a good way,” she said, peering into my face, as though she realized she’d lost something there and was trying to find it.
And as we walked in the direction of her house I knew all the pain was worth it—more, if necessary. Plus, I might even have saved my own life. How fortuitous was that?
My mother’s hands waved in the air, reliving the position of me, the position of the car, analyzing all the what-ifs. Her voice broke and she stopped, cupping little Faye’s face in her hands. She looked at me, and all the what-might-have-beens swam in her eyes.
“How can I ever repay you?” she said, barely audible.
“There’s no need,” I said.
I could have explained that my gain from preventing my younger self from being hit by a car was at least as great as hers. But I just let it tickle me, in a mind-boggling sort of way.
My mother took a deep breath and smiled. “We’re okay,” she said, as though reassuring herself of the truth of it. She chattered away as we walked, and I listened, mopping up her words like a piece of bread in the gravy. Her tone was familiar, at once calm and excited, like that of an adult telling a child a story that promises adventure. She told me what we would do when we got to her place, that she would look at my cuts and make some tea, and she thought she ought to run me a bath.
“It’ll help get the grit out.” She looked closely at my face again, and my arm, and grimaced. “I’ll see to that when we’re home, I’m a good nurse.”
“You’re a nurse!” I said.
“Not a real one, just a good pretend one,” she said. “We’ll take a look at it, and if it’s really bad, I suppose we ought to get you to a hospital.”
“Mummy doesn’t trust hospitals, she says they make you sicker.” Little Faye slippe
d her hand into mine and I felt something like an electric shock run through me. In that moment I remembered the stories where you shouldn’t let your past self see your current self, otherwise something would happen, something bad. Ah well, I would have to discover the rules for myself, and hopefully not break any that mattered.
“Well, yes, I think that can happen, you can go to the hospital with one thing, and come out with something even worse,” I said pulling a silly frightened expression at little Faye, and wondering if my mother’s chest infections could have been helped if only she’d gone to a hospital. She gave me a sideways glance.
“It does happen,” said Jeanie in a low voice, suddenly serious.
“What are we going to do?” I said, looking at little Faye. “We have the same name and we’re going to get all muddled up.”
She giggled. “I could be Faye One and you can be Faye Two, as you came along second.”
Jeanie laughed. “Well, technically, she came along first,” she said, nodding in my direction and winking at me as she had back at Em and Henry’s. I’d forgotten my mother’s winks, but they were so familiar that I must have kept winks in cold storage in my mind. I had also filed away the habit she had of sweeping her hair to one side and over her shoulder.
“We could call you by your middle name,” said little Faye. “What is it?”
I started to say “Susannah” without thinking, but stopped myself just in time and said “Sarah” instead. It would be too much of a coincidence to have the same middle name.
“We have the same initials!” said little Faye in a reverent whisper, as though she had found treasure.
“Wow!” I said, bobbing down in front of her. “We could be twins!”
“Well, she looks more like you than me,” said Jeanie.
“Do you want to call me by my middle name then?” I asked. “I don’t mind.”
“No, I’ll call you Faye, we won’t get confused. And thank you for saving my life. I have a feeling we’re going to be friends, don’t you?”
“Friends? Me and you?” I pretended to look uncertain about that for a moment, then took her hand again and smiled. “I guarantee it.”
* * *
“I HAVE A top just like this!” Jeanie said, holding up the torn black sweater I’d taken from her drawer earlier that morning. “Mind you, I suppose everyone does.” We were back at the house, in my mother’s bedroom. I had taken off all my clothes and put on one of her dressing gowns. She’d asked me whether I wanted tea first or a bath, and I chose tea. But she’d suggested I get out of my clothes and into something warm straightaway. I was worried she’d see the boots—her boots—so I quickly put them in the bottom of her wardrobe; everything else I laid on her bed. My jeans were ripped, and absolutely filthy.
“You can have some of my clothes, after your bath. I think these are ruined, don’t you?” She frowned again at the sweater and then bundled it up, ready to throw away.
I nodded and gazed at my mother. I wanted to launch into a flurry of questions, ask her all the things you wish you’d asked your mother before it was too late. But I didn’t want her to think I was nuts or nosy; I wanted her to like me. Also, that normalness, just being around her, was addictive. It was the luxury of taking a privilege for granted. Despite the events that had preceded this moment, I was wallowing in just being around this woman—a woman, frankly, I did not know. A list of facts about her didn’t seem important just then.
I guess it’s like this when you get out of prison and see a loved one for the first time in years. You feel a frantic urge to make up for lost time, but it’s not doable, so you just ask if they want a drink and inquire how they are, as if you’d just seen them yesterday. A person can’t stay in a perpetual state of excitement, no matter how exhilarating or profound the situation is. At some point, maybe quite soon after the monumental moment, the world settles back into a reasonably normal state. I thought of sand in a clear bottle of water, being shaken so the grains flew about and spun, only to settle before long into the place where they started at the bottom. We all return to some equilibrium—it’s natural, homeostasis. I guess the moment we stop finding an inner balance in response to extraordinary events is the moment we go mad. But please don’t think for a moment that the gravity, the sheer enormity of what was happening, escaped me.
And anyway, you know, I didn’t necessarily want all the big questions answered. Not yet. It was the little things that fascinated me, like how she bit the corner of her thumb when she was pondering something. How she liked to cup Faye’s face when Faye was telling her something. How sometimes she would interrupt Faye when she was talking, to tell her she loved her. “Mummy,” Faye would say, “listen to me!”
And I was learning how my mother treated a stranger; I was seeing her through the eyes of an adult. And that was a new experience for me.
* * *
WE SAT AT the kitchen table. I traced with my finger the outlines of small pink flowers and tendrils of green that decorated the tablecloth, and my mother dabbed my face with warm water and Dettol disinfectant on some cotton. The concentration in her eyes allowed mine to roam her features. I watched her hands working and urged myself to dedicate all details to memory so that I could, in the future, recall the white half-moons at the base of her nails. I observed her face as though I would be quizzed about it later: eye color; the flare of her nostrils when she sniffed; her perfect ears, with dangling silver chains in them; the peach tone of her skin; the freckle southeast of her left eye; the healthy white teeth and big easy smile. She smiled as if it was easier to smile than for her face to be at rest. She spoke as she worked, lifting my hand to examine it more closely, her face animated. She looked as though she were talking directly to my hand, and it gave me the opportunity to simply drink her in.
She poured tea. “You said you have children?”
“Yes. Two girls, Esther and Evie.”
“Good girls or bad girls?” She winked again. My mother was asking about the grandchildren she would never meet.
“Esther is so sensible, she’s like a teacher at home,” I said. “She sets our dining room chairs out as if we’re in a little schoolroom and makes me and Evie sit in them and calls the roll, and asks us questions. She even checks our fingernails like an old-fashioned schoolmarm, and tuts at us disapprovingly.
“Evie is so funny. She looks like an angel,” I continued, “but she burps like a beer-drinking dockworker. She likes to shock old people by belching loudly when they’ve already said what a little darling she is. She’s younger than Esther, but will thump anyone who hurts her sister’s feelings.”
Jeanie smiled wide. “I wish I had a sister,” she said.
“Do you have any brothers?” I asked, knowing the answer already.
“No,” she said, “I have no one.”
“No family at all? Mum and dad?” I knew there was nobody, but I didn’t know why.
“No one.” She got up and walked to the fridge and opened it, sighing as though the emptiness there were part of the wider emptiness of her family. She swung the door shut and leaned against it. Her slender figure cut a striking image, her flowing skirts and floppy top not doing anything to hide her almost frail frame. “They’re dead. Long time.”
“How?”
“I was very young, my mum went into the hospital with an illness and never came out, she died; and then apparently my dad got sick straightaway, and he died too.”
“Fuck,” I said.
“My thoughts exactly. I’ve got a couple of old photos of them, but I honestly can’t remember them. When I think of them, I just see the photos, not really them, and when I took Faye to the hospital once, the smell—oh God, did that remind me of them. And not in a good way, just reminded me of loss, confusion.”
“And you were fostered?” I said.
“Yeah, just one place after another. You can’t grow up quick enough when that happens to you, you just need to survive long enough to get out, and then, well, get out. And tha
t’s what I did.
“Anyway, Miss Journalist. How about you, where are your parents?”
My throat tightened to stop me blurting out anything ridiculous. “No brothers or sisters. My mum’s around.” I stared at her meaningfully. “I don’t know my dad.”
“What’s your mum like?”
“Oh, I don’t know her very well, which is such a shame. I don’t see her very often.”
“Pah,” Jeanie said, batting her hand as if at an imaginary fly and pulling out a chair to sit down in front of me.
“What?”
“You don’t need to know her, don’t worry about that.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“People all make the same mistake, and I’ve given this a lot of thought.” She took a long sip of tea and assumed the posture of an expert on the witness stand. “You cannot know your parents,” she said. “And so you mustn’t waste time thinking it’s the most important thing. You can spend your whole life trying to know them. It’s a total waste of time! Only three things matter when it comes to your parents.” She stopped dramatically and drank more tea, very slowly.
“And they are…?”
Her eyes sparkled. “So glad you asked. The first, most important thing is to know that your parents love you. Some parents go wrong here and assume that their children know it. But you have to be clear, tell your children you love them, and how much, and why. And if you’re the child and you don’t feel loved, you can forget bothering to know them. Love is the baseline.”