by Helen Fisher
“What about the police? Didn’t they look for her?”
“I don’t know what happened with the police, they came round and asked some questions, that’s all. But like us, they knew it was hard to be a single mother, hard now, even harder then. And what with her habit of taking drugs, I think people just made their own minds up about what had happened; suicide seemed the most likely explanation.” He paused. “Shall I stop?”
“No.” I sniffed, and rummaged in my bag for tissues.
“I think the signs were that she’d just walked off willingly, and never came back. Some people wondered if, in her own way, she had done what she thought was best for you. There didn’t seem to be anything suspicious, or anyone else involved, and the police had no idea where she’d gone. You can trace people these days with mobile phones and CCTV, but not then.”
I couldn’t take it in. The hazy image of my mother passing away in bed following a chest infection, which I had imagined, or which had been implanted (or both),was replaced by a vision of her walking barefoot through woodland in a long flowing dress, with flowers in her hair, hands heavy, dangling by her sides, until she disappeared completely from view.
“The grave!” I said, suddenly and stupidly. “You took me to her grave.”
Uncle Henry shook his head. “I’m sorry about that, I really am. Em and I decided at the time it was a good idea, but we weren’t sure.”
“What was it, a stone put there for her, because she was missing?”
“It wasn’t hers, it was someone else’s gravestone; it had no name on it, just said Beloved and missed, one day to be reunited. We thought it might somehow be better for you if you’d seen a grave, something real, so that you could move on with your life.”
I was mute. Dumbfounded.
“Everything we did, we did to try to help you, to do what we thought was best for you. I know we got some things wrong, and I am so very, very sorry about the grave, it seems terrible now that we took you there.”
Leaning over, I held Henry’s hand and rested my face in his palm. He stroked my hair with his other hand, tucking stray tendrils behind my ear. “I understand,” I said, finally. “I don’t blame you for anything. I was very lucky to have you. And I’m upset, but not angry with you.”
“Thank you,” he said, his voice low and croaky again.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I whispered after some time.
“There was never a good time. You always seemed so happy, and we didn’t want to spoil it. We talked, Em and I, and we were frightened that if we told you, you might abandon your happy life and try to find her. People spend their whole lives searching for people, you know?”
“I know.”
“My worry,” he continued, “is that you may go searching for her even now. A body is so important, gruesome as that may sound. If she happened to be alive somewhere, she’d be in her fifties. You won’t go looking, will you?”
“Where would I even start?” I said.
Henry held both my hands within his own, slowly rubbing them.
“What do you think happened to her, Uncle Henry? Really? Honestly.”
He sighed again, a sigh heavy with the weight of his unspoken words. “Honestly,” he said, “I always imagined her walking into water. I imagined her drowning.”
I leaned back on the sofa and tried to compose myself when the girls came back inside. Eddie could tell I was shaken, but the girls were too bustling to notice anything. “Let’s have our picnic!” they shouted, and I wheeled Henry into the garden and spread a blanket on the ground.
Eddie kept looking over at me, silently checking if I was okay. I nodded at him, and I managed to pass round strawberries and flapjack and slices of pork pie, I managed to pour tea out of a flask into old-fashioned china cups that the children insisted on bringing to picnics, and all the time I felt the burden of my actions pressing heavier and heavier on my shoulders.
My mother hadn’t died: she’d disappeared and ended up God-knows-where going mad in search of me. She had embarked on a futile search in the belief that I was a guardian angel who could help her with her child if something awful happened to her. And I had brought all that about by visiting her in the first place. I could understand why she’d gone off searching, but why hadn’t she come back? Had she fallen off a cliff into the sea? Had she met a bunch of hippies and got lost in some heady, half-conscious world? I didn’t believe that. If my mother could have come back to me, she would have. She’d gone looking for me—the grown-up me she’d met when I went to visit her—and while she was away something had happened to her that meant she couldn’t get home.
My time traveling had resulted in Jeanie being missing from my life. But there was no proof of her death one way or another. And so, only one simple thought occupied my head: my mother could be alive.
The following day was Sunday, the last day of October school break, and we had done that blessed thing: made no plans. Our no-plans days with the girls actually involved a kind of plan: late breakfast, watch a movie in our pajamas, a walk, and a takeaway as a special treat before going back to school. Come to think of it, our no-plans days were stricter in their itinerary than some of our organized days out. Even the walk we took on days like this tended to involve a route, which led across an old bridge over a motorway. Eddie had taught the girls and me how to get trucks to honk their horns by putting an arm straight up in the air, making a fist, and pulling down as if yanking the cord on an old-fashioned bus. At first we’d thought Eddie was teasing us, but the first truck that thundered toward us blaring its horn had us leaping around in disbelief and delight as if our team had just scored in the World Cup.
But I was desperate to talk to Louis, so I sent him a furtive little text asking him to call me and say he was really upset about something and beg me to come over, so I could make my excuses convincingly. If I just announced I was going out to see Louis, or anyone, Eddie would be suspicious. I felt like a teenager lying to my parents to get out of the house, but I absolutely couldn’t wait.
“Really? Today? Won’t it wait till work tomorrow?” Eddie said as I pulled my coat and boots on.
“He’s really upset, Eddie,” I said. “And when you’re a vicar, all our Sundays will be ruined. This is just good practice.” He frowned as I kissed him on the lips, and he didn’t kiss back. “Just kidding,” I said. “I won’t be long, couple of hours, and we’ll…” I pulled an imaginary chain in the air as I walked backward down the driveway, smiling at him.
“Honk-honk,” he said, without smiling back.
When Louis opened the door, I pushed past him, hung my hat on the neat row of hooks, and pulled my boots off with a grunt.
“Come in, why don’t you?” he said.
“I went to see Uncle Henry yesterday,” I said.
“Tea?”
“Please.”
“What did he say?” Louis headed for the kitchen and the kettle.
I told Louis everything, and as I finished, I felt this wild sensation, as though I had told my story on a windy day at the top of a mountain. I was breathless. I had feelings of despair, it’s true, a sort of nagging misery that everything was my fault. But during the night I’d been increasingly imbued with these powerful feelings of hope that were like shining gold threads through my gloom. Hope that my beautiful mother was in this world, here and now, with me. At the same time as me.
“Your mum, if she’s alive, would be about fifty-six, right?” Louis said.
“Yes,” I said, still breathless.
“Sit down, for God’s sake, I can feel you looming over me.”
I sat, but on the edge of the seat, desperate for action, movement, discovery.
“This is actually interesting,” Louis said.
“And the rest of it hasn’t been? You’re a tough audience, Louis.”
“So if she’s alive, she’s potentially findable,” he said, resting his chin on a fist. “But…”
“But what?” I said.
“She had to know where you were—you didn’t move away, you just lived up the road. For years. You were findable for a long time.”
I knew where Louis was going with this logic, of course, I’d thought of it myself; but hearing it from him, I started to deflate like an old balloon.
“I realize she could have tried to find me,” I said.
“Hand,” Louis said, and I gave him my hand to hold across the table. “Don’t take this too hard,” he said. “But from what you’ve told me about your mother, I can’t imagine her just wandering off and never coming home.” He put his other hand to my face, his thumb on my puckered chin. “It’s okay to cry.”
“Again.”
“As many times as it takes,” he said patiently.
A clock ticked and the sound seemed loud, though I’d not noticed it before.
“If she’s alive and well, then she really doesn’t want me,” I said.
“Well, you’re right in that you can’t possibly know what happened to her, Faye. Maybe she is alive, it’s a possibility now. But maybe she’s not well. Or… God. Who knows what happened.”
My thoughts tripped over themselves, slapstick-style. I couldn’t mentally order the various options of what might have happened to my mother, couldn’t keep track of my speculation. Too much was happening to me at once. Louis helped me lay the theories out like playing cards. Unfortunately there was no real ace in the pack. My mother could be dead. Suicide, as Henry had thought, or maybe another kind of death. Or she could be alive and well, living right now in the present: an older woman somewhere at the end of a telephone, a flight, a car journey, a woman who had chosen not to come back to me. She could be alive in the present, but not well, something so wrong that she was unable to find or contact me. Or maybe there was some other reason that she hadn’t gotten in touch.
“What do you think, Faye, what’s your gut reaction? You’ve met the woman.”
“The woman I met wouldn’t leave her daughter behind willingly,” I said.
“So you don’t think it’s possible she’s alive and well?”
“Not likely.”
“You think she’s more likely to be alive and totally unable to contact you for whatever reason? Maybe sick, or lost her mind, or…” He paused. “Sorry.”
I shook my head.
“Faye?”
“Oh, Louis,” I said, barely audible even to my own ears. “You’ve got me thinking that the most logical conclusion to all this is that my mother is dead after all. I was just clinging to some fragment of hope that I could see her again without having to risk everything by going back in the box.”
“But there’s still a chance she might not be dead, and if we can find her, we should try,” Louis said. “Worth a google, at least. Come on.” He pulled me to my feet and led me up the stairs, and I wondered what I should wish for as Louis’s computer screen blinked and woke up.
“What’s her surname?” Louis said, his fingers poised over the keypad.
“Jones,” I said. And Louis turned to look at me, as though he could see me. “Oh dear, I was hoping for something a little less common.”
“Sorry.”
We trawled the Net. Louis is a good researcher, but we couldn’t find any lead or any information. We had no other names by which to find her in a more indirect way, and after a while we gave up.
“I’m going to go back,” I said. “Make things right. Save her.”
“What’s the point?” Louis said. “You can’t change anything, Faye, because you’ve already lived your whole life without your mother. Whatever happened to her, it already happened, you can’t change anything. We’ve discussed this.”
“I have to try,” I said. “If I go back and tell her who I really am, if I explain everything, she won’t go looking for me. She won’t wander off and she won’t disappear.”
“But she will disappear, won’t she?” Louis said, as though frustrated with an intelligent child who couldn’t understand a simple equation. “Because she already has.”
“We can’t be sure it works like that. Like Elizabeth says, we don’t really know the rules.”
Louis took a massive intake of breath and then puffed his cheeks and let it out slowly. “You can’t change things,” he said again, sounding resigned.
“Well, maybe I can.” I watched as Louis shook his head, and felt annoyed. I was being unfair, but what I really wanted was for him to just support me, whatever I decided to do. I didn’t need him to tell me this was a bad idea; I just needed a cheerleader.
“The easy option didn’t work,” I said. “We looked for her online, from the comfort of your study, a nice safe space between us and the real world, and it didn’t help. So I’m going to have to do something, something… practical. I’m going to have to get my hands dirty.”
“I’d go back for you, if I could, if it would make any difference,” he said.
“Bullshit,” I shouted.
“I’m only trying to help, Faye. I understand how frustrated you are, and maybe you’re feeling guilty about what happened to your mum, but you shouldn’t. You didn’t know the consequences, it’s not your fault. But I think you need to stop for a moment and look at what you’ve got to lose. I think going back is too risky. I think you know that.”
“Do you know what I think, Louis? I think you’re jealous, I guarantee you’re jealous, and I think you’re worried, like Elizabeth, that my actions will spoil your status quo, and frankly that surprises me a little.” He looked up and managed to stare straight at me, in that unnerving way. But I was annoyed; that was the fact of the matter. He didn’t say anything, didn’t apply the hand brake to the conversation, and that’s my feeble excuse for what I said next. “Maybe if I go back and change things, then when I get back, maybe you won’t be blind anymore.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” he said, and the silence between us weighed a ton. He got up and headed downstairs at speed. I trotted behind him.
“I’m sorry, Louis, I didn’t mean that.”
“Didn’t you?” he said. “Well, I would prefer not to be blind, as it happens.”
“It was a stupid thing to say. I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry. You know, I’ve assumed my whole life that my mother was dead. I’ve been lied to, and I know why they did it, but still…” My words petered away. “She was wronged, and I was wronged. But the bottom line is, it is my fault. So if I can do something to fix it, then I need to try. Can you understand that?”
“Yes, I can understand that, but please listen to me for a moment. Please?”
“Okay,” I said, forcing myself to shut up.
“Sit,” he said, and we both took our places at the wooden table again.
“People lie,” Louis said, and then he was quiet for ages, and I felt like he was testing me to see if I would resist interrupting him. I didn’t say a word, and after a few long beats, he spoke again. “People lie, and they do it for all sorts of reasons, sometimes they do it to protect you, and sometimes they do it to protect themselves. But lies are like wasps in the grass, waiting for a bare foot to find them. A lie is like a living thing, surviving until it’s discovered.”
“Skip to the end,” I said in a singsong voice; a private joke between us, when the other is going off on one.
“Okay, my point is this. I had a visitor yesterday too.” He paused for dramatic effect.
“Who?” I said.
“Elizabeth.”
“Why?” I said, feeling lost.
Louis stood up and opened a shallow kitchen drawer and took out a slim puffy envelope, which he pushed across the table toward me.
I opened it, and out dropped my engagement ring. It sat on the table like an old friend I thought I would never see again. Its familiarity stunned me.
“How?” I said.
“Elizabeth lied about it being stolen.”
“She what? So what made her tell you?” I asked, bewildered.
“Because I guessed that she’d lied, and I wrote to her, and th
en we spoke on the phone, and then she brought it to me. She feels bad about it, felt bad all the time about it. But she wanted to say something that might stop you going back to the past.”
I played with the ring, getting to know it again before putting it back on, swapping the eternity ring to my other hand.
“She wants you to keep the ring she sent you,” he said, as I was sliding it up my finger. “She’s very sorry, Faye, don’t be too hard on her.”
“How did you guess she’d lied?” I said.
“It was the fact that the eternity ring she sent you fitted your fourth finger perfectly. Either it was a coincidence, or she took the measurement of the ring she already had in order to get the right size for you. It’s my understanding that finger size is not an easy thing to guess, so I decided it probably wasn’t a coincidence.”
“Sherlock, I’m impressed,” I said. “And pleased to have my ring back.”
“Elizabeth didn’t want you to go back, that’s why she lied. She thought your ring being lost might give you pause enough to stop rushing back in time, make you think you could change things, perhaps for the worse. Even though that logic doesn’t work, as we know. We don’t know the rules for sure, Faye, and yet I am sure there’s no point in going back to change what happened to your mother, because you can’t. And I am terrified you’ll hurt yourself, and never come home.”
“I still think I can stop her wandering off, stop her disappearing,” I said.
“For goodness’ sake Faye. You can’t. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but it’s already happened. There’s no point. At best—” He stopped.
“At best, what?” I said.
“At best, I think whatever you do, she’ll die anyway. You can’t have her. Because you never did.”
The funny thing is, I didn’t feel the slightest bit deterred by his words. Maybe I just needed the slightest of excuses. Maybe Elizabeth had been absolutely right to stop me rushing back to the past. But now I’d had time to think about things, and the hesitation I’d had seemed to evaporate in the certainty that I couldn’t hurt Esther, Evie, or Eddie by visiting Jeanie one last time; my mind was made up.