Little Wishes

by Michelle Adams

  “Are you serious?” she asked, her mouth full.

  He nodded sheepishly. “Stupid of me, especially after what happened to Daniel.”

  But she was the stupid one, she realized then, asking him to take her out on a boat like that after he had told her what happened to his brother. “Oh, Tom,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t think.”

  “What are you sorry for?” he said, surprised.

  “For suggesting the trip. It wasn’t fair.”

  The casual shrug of his shoulders eased her discomfort at what she perceived as her mistake. “Elizabeth, it’s fine. What happened to Daniel was an accident, despite what my dad thinks.”

  “What?” she asked, clambering toward him. “He doesn’t think so?”

  “No, not really.” What was worse than his answer was the look on his face, as if some distant memory had taken hold of him, digging in its claws. “He thinks I’m to blame.”

  “No!” she shouted, wanting to touch him and not knowing how. “That’s not possible.”

  The moment before he spoke was one of the most painful of her life. How could Mr. Hale blame Tom for his brother’s death? “You see, Dad had built that boat, but I wasn’t watching when Daniel took it. Do you remember him before, Dad I mean? No? Well, he was a pretty decent guy. Member of the lifeboat crew, excellent carpenter. But the snow the previous winter had rotted the hull of that little boat, and when Daniel took it, I was in the bath. Should have been watching him, but I wasn’t. He knew how to row good enough, but once he hit the choppier waters past the reef the boat capsized. Wasn’t strong enough to make it back.”

  Her hand found his shoulder. “You can’t be blamed for that.”

  “Doesn’t matter either way. All our lives changed after that. My mother held herself together, how I don’t know, but she did. But my father got stuck in the mud of it, numbed himself with drink, and finds it easier to blame me than accept that Daniel’s gone. He’s never been the same since. Don’t suppose any of us have, really.”

  Her mind was all over the place, thinking of the risk they had taken, and of Daniel, the life unnecessarily lost. How quickly it could be taken from you, how little time they really had. Tom’s eyes shone blue as the sky overhead, the clouds casting shadows at their feet. And then all Elizabeth could see was her own future, married to a man she didn’t love. How could she live and die in that life she didn’t want?

  “Are you okay?” Tom asked, sensing her discomfort. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I don’t love James,” she blurted out without really thinking. “But I’m supposed to be getting married to him.”

  “Yes,” said Tom, nibbling his thumbnail. “I haven’t forgotten about that.” His fingers were surprisingly warm as he rested a hand on hers. “If you don’t love him, why would you marry him?”

  The vista was as wide and great as anything she had ever seen. A big sky under which small decisions were made that changed the course of whole lives. So much life out there, just waiting to be lived. All those risks she was yet to take. Tom’s eyes shone like sapphires as she gazed at them and wondered.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t even know if he loves me.”

  “What if I told you I loved you,” Tom said, “and that I could love you until my dying day, whether that’s next year or next century?”

  It made her want to cry, the easy way in which he spoke of love, aware still that his hand was resting on hers, his fingers touching the spot where she should have been wearing an engagement ring.

  “Next century?” she asked. Her breath had become quick, her voice shaky. “That’s a long time, isn’t it?”

  His weight shifted toward her as he took his hand from hers. As soon as it moved she felt as if something was missing. Tingles raced across her skin as his breath struck her cheek, and despite their proximity, his body over hers, she thought for a moment he seemed shy. “It’s a whole lifetime, Elizabeth,” he replied after a while. “But if you can’t love somebody forever, what’s the point in loving them at all?”

  Now

  The ringing of the doorbell was a welcome interruption to the banality of morning television. It was a routine they had slipped into, something neither of them could have imagined doing just a few short weeks ago.

  “I’ll get it,” she said, pressing the power button on the television. The rubber gloves snapped off as she pulled them from her hands, setting them down on the side next to the bowl of warm soapy water that she had been using to clean the mantel and the trinkets on it. The faint odor of cigarettes still permeated the room, drifting from every surface, and until it was gone, her work was unfinished. “It’ll be Jim here to cut the lawn.”

  His form was just visible through the dimpled glass. As she opened the door to the cool air of a bright autumn day, she saw him nibbling his lip and pulling at his fingers. People didn’t know how to act in the presence of cancer, she realized, or what to say. But sometimes saying nothing at all was better than rattling on and on until you said the wrong thing. Only yesterday they had been in a café for a quick stop on the way down Hampstead High Street when Tom saw an old friend he used to work with when he first moved to London. Elizabeth had listened politely as the man called Graham regaled the story of his own mother, and how cancer, in his own words, had ravaged the very bones of her until there was nothing left but skin. Afterward Tom had turned to Elizabeth and simply said, “Well, that made me feel better,” and they’d had a bloody good laugh about it until tears pricked their eyes and dripped onto their untouched toasted tea cakes. Why did people think you needed to hear their horror stories when you were already living through your own?

  “Do you want to come through?” she asked Jim, leading the way. “I’ve got the kettle on if you’d like a cup of tea.”

  “That’d be great,” Jim said, setting his hat on the coat stand before following Elizabeth through to the living room. Tom was asleep in his chair.

  “Give him a nudge,” Elizabeth suggested. “I’ll go and get that tea.”

  Moments later she could hear the soft mumble of their chatter as Tom and Jim moved to the garden. It was good to hear Tom speaking, nice to hear his easy conversation with a friend of many years. The cups felt heavy as she pulled them from the cupboard, her fingers aching and muscles sore. Too much cleaning for want of something better to do. Tom was asleep so often she had to keep herself busy. The leaflet she had brought back from the hospital was on the counter, so she picked that up while she waited for the kettle to boil. It was about lung cancer, and she had read it cover to cover. It claimed that 90 percent of people who got lung cancer were smokers, and it was the main reason why she was still doing her best to remove the evidence that a smoker had ever lived there, trying to polish away every trace of the enemy, as if it might make a difference. But still, even with all the information from that little book, she felt none the wiser. It couldn’t tell her whether she would lose Tom, and that was all that mattered.

  “Said she’d find me, didn’t I?” Tom said as Elizabeth arrived in the garden. Jim looked up with a smile, a smudge of mud already across his cheek from where he was weeding one of the rose beds. An early frost had gripped the ground last night, and it had melted in the morning sun, wetting everything in its path. “She always does,” Tom said as she sat down. His hand reached for hers, and as she nestled in alongside him, she felt like an eighteen-year-old girl on her first date. The cool weather meant she really needed a coat, but she didn’t want to leave him to fetch it. Sometimes she couldn’t even bear to go to sleep because it meant she had to stop watching him as he slept in the chair, checking every few minutes that he was still there. The old dream kept coming back to her, the same one from the night he saved her mother, that she was drowning, and he was saving her. Only now they were older in the dream, and she always woke up before they made it to shore. “Look at those,” he said, raising the end of his walking stick. “Aren’t they magnificent?”

  Under the t
ree in the corner of the garden grew speckles of blue and purple, white tips sneaking toward the light through a carpet of golden leaves. “Croci,” she said. “My favorite.”

  “I know,” he said. “Why do you think I planted them? I needed a good selection to choose from. Every year I chose the best, which wasn’t always easy, as by September most of them are already fading.”

  “You’re an old romantic, Tom,” Jim said, leaning back on his heels, an appreciative smile on his face. He wiped his brow, sweating despite the chill, then sipped his tea.

  “You weren’t really thinking of me when you planted them, were you?” she asked.

  “Sometimes I think you forget the way I love you.” Warmth flooded her then as he squeezed her hand. “I was always thinking of you.”

  * * *

  Elizabeth listened as Tom and Jim talked of the old days for well over an hour: how the street had changed, and how it was near impossible to get a parking space nowadays. After a while Tom got cold, and with Jim’s help he went for a rest in his chair. Jim’s sigh was deep and weary as he joined Elizabeth in the kitchen.

  “He’ll be out like a light, I reckon.”

  Elizabeth handed him another cup of tea. It was the fourth since he’d arrived. The man sure could drink. Crumbs fell to the table as he helped himself to a second slice of Hevva cake, a Cornish favorite that Elizabeth had made for Tom the night before, and which she had managed to burn at the base as usual.

  “He sleeps a lot just lately.”

  “Bloody awful disease. Lost my first wife to it years before.”

  “I’m sorry.” The sound of Tom’s snoring came as an immediate comfort. “I didn’t know that.”

  And then it was as if he suddenly had to let it all out, speaking with a full mouth, his words fast but barely more than a whisper. “Over thirty years ago now. I was only twenty-five. Thought we had a whole life ahead of us, didn’t I.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said again, not coming up with anything better.

  “Nothing you can do to change the hand you get dealt, is there? When I talk about her now people always assume it’s a fairy tale I’m painting. That she couldn’t have been as wonderful as I say. But she really was.” The kitchen chair creaked as he leaned back, took another bite of the cake. Elizabeth followed his lead and took a slice for herself. “Of course, after that I met Phillipa, and she’s been a fantastic wife and mother to our two. But there’s something about first love. You can go on to love again, but it’s never the same. It’s not the new person’s fault or anything. It’s just when you first fall in love you have no idea of just how hard it is to lose somebody. You don’t leave yourself open to it a second time. Don’t you think?”

  “I do,” she said, not looking up. “I really do.”

  * * *

  It was a strange mix of relief and disappointment when she saw Jim off not long after that. The bags of garden waste were heavy as she helped him carry them through to the front, ready for recycling, along with a bunch of cut roses, which he said he would drop off for Alice when he went into the city later that afternoon because he knew they were her favorite. Waving as he entered his house, she looked up the busy city street on which she was living: the trees, bare in places, still clinging to leaves in others; the cars too numerous; the background din of normal life, whatever it was that normal meant. A place like this could never really be home for her, and she doubted it was for Tom either.

  The coast ran through her like a mountain spring, even though as a young woman she had always dreamed of coming here. Porthsennen formed in her mind as she looked up at a sorry chink of blue sky, that wide coastal vista and how small what she saw now seemed in comparison. Lives had come and gone, with young wives lost, children raised to adulthood in the time since they had first fallen in love. Was it true what Jim had said, that the first love is always the strongest? Maybe it was. And she knew, like Jim knew, that if she was forced to lose Tom soon, she could at least say that she had spent a whole lifetime loving him. Many people didn’t get that.

  * * *

  That afternoon after Tom woke up, Elizabeth made them tea and set a couple of slices of Hevva cake on a plate. He was impressed by her efforts, even though it wasn’t as good as what he could once make himself. How good it was to have her in the house, puttering about, as if she had always been there. And the reality was that he didn’t feel all that different from back when he’d first met her. But all he could think about these last few days was that if they did confirm that he had cancer next Tuesday, there might only be a little bit of time left. Suddenly it was finite. How could he die if he never saw the cottage in which he was raised again, or if he didn’t ask Elizabeth the question he wanted to ask? About the things he thought he knew, and that had kept him returning to Porthsennen year in and year out? Returning during his years of marriage had been more complicated, yet his wife never questioned his excuse of a fishing trip to see old friends.

  He had always felt as if he was betraying her as she waved him off, yet equally felt that sense of betrayal toward Elizabeth when he considered no longer going. So, every year he had been back, delivering those flowers and wishes, each visit a chance to knock on the door and put things right, uncover the secret—if there was one—and yet he hadn’t taken a single one of them. He was a bloody coward; he knew that all right. But if there was something to amend for, he wanted to do it now while he still had the chance, not think about how one day life would just be over, snuffed out like a candle flame, nothing more than a faint smoke trail that would, like memories, fade over time.

  * * *

  “I was thinking,” he said as he picked off a small piece of cake. It stuck in his teeth, his mouth too dry. “We should go to Cornwall sooner rather than later. Maybe even before the bronchoscopy.” Cornwall was the place to have those important conversations. “It’s about time Alice saw where all this began.”

  “Where all what began?” she said, muting the television. Crumbs settled in her lap as they fell from her lips.

  “This,” he said, flicking a finger back and forth between the two of them. “And maybe we should see it too. Together one last time in the place where we met, so that if there was something we needed to say to each other, we would have the chance that we never got the first time round.”

  “Well, that’s because you left without word or explanation, Thomas Hale. Even now it amazes me to think of it.”

  “What was I supposed to do? Stick around and watch you and James play happy families?” he said without looking up. “I can’t believe you married him as quick as you did after I went to Wolf Rock.”

  Her tutting cut through his indignance. “And I can’t believe you still believe what he told you.”

  “What?” he said, his eyes narrowing.

  “He wanted shot of you, so he told you we were married, but we weren’t. I only married him because you left.”

  “You mean to tell me . . .” The weight of the news caused him to deflate in his chair. “That bloody lying bastard,” he said after a while, and then, “What a fool I was.”

  “No, Tom. Fooled, but not a fool. He lied to us both, and we were too green to see through it. When he told me the truth, we separated.”

  “When was that?”

  “Seven years after you left. After that, it was just me and Kate. There was never anybody else.”

  A heavy sigh shuddered through his lips. “How I wish I could go back and change things. All these years on our own, and we could have been together.”

  “No point thinking like that. We had our chances. Still, I do think it would be lovely to go back together now. Perhaps see about a few of those wishes you wrote me.”

  “I can’t even remember what most of them were now,” he said, still amazed at the revelations. He watched as she got up and headed through to the hall. “Where are you going?” he called.

  “I’ll be back in a moment.” And sure enough, just a short while later he heard her descending the stai
rs. When prompted he moved across in his chair, his bones aching as Elizabeth eased in beside him. There wasn’t much room, but it was enough. The springs in the cushion creaked, and if he was honest, from the way she winced as she assumed position, it seemed as if her hips were telling her it was a bad idea too. But when she rested her head back against his shoulder, the sensation of her body against his overcame any pain he might have otherwise felt.

  “What’s that?” he asked, nodding toward the basket in her hand.

  Her fingers fiddled at the clasp and she removed the lid, angled it so he could see inside. Breath rushed from him as he realized what it was. “It’s the life you wanted us to live together. I was thinking, now that I’m here with you, perhaps we could try our best to live it now.”

  “You kept them all,” he whispered, reaching into the basket and fingering through the little blue notes. Paper rustled, stirring his memories. For a moment he thought he could smell the sea.

  “‘Sometimes I think you forget the way I love you,’” she said, repeating his words from earlier in the day. Heat rose in her cheeks, and he could feel himself getting choked up. Pulling one of the notes out, he read aloud.

  “‘1992: I wish we could fly kites together across the sand of Whitesand Bay.’” A tear broke free, which he quickly wiped away. “So, you really did care that I came each year.”

  “Of course I did. That one might have to wait for Porthsennen.” Her fingers riffled in the basket, and there it was again, that scent that was unmistakably home. “Here’s one we can cross off the list, though. From 1970. ‘I wish that I could stroke your face and kiss your lips.’”

  It was a struggle not to cry again, his chin quivering at just the idea. “There wasn’t a year that went by that I didn’t wish for that.”