The Coordinates of Loss

by Amanda Prowse

  She helped cast off the rope from the mooring and pulled up the fenders as they left the marina, as if it were any other sailing trip.

  James called back to her, ‘Are you okay?’

  She gave the double thumbs-up, making her way across the gangway, only briefly glancing at the stairs that led down to the galley.

  Rach, Oscar! Coffee’s ready!

  She reached the white vinyl cushions with the navy piping and sank down on the foredeck. With a genuine rush of excitement in her chest she stared ahead at the wide expanse of ocean dotted with rocky outcrops, sandbars, coral reefs and narrow archipelago clusters that made navigating the route to Bermuda’s shores so hazardous. James hit the throttle and they motored out.

  Rachel rested now on her elbows with her feet planted in front of her and tilted her head back, letting the sun and fine sea spray coat her, connecting her to the ocean.

  ‘I’m coming, baby! Mummy’s coming, Oscar!’ she whispered into the wind as it whipped her hair around her face.

  Liberté picked up speed. Twenty minutes later they reached deep water and James slowed the vessel, anchoring up. He came to join her on the foredeck and sat down by her side. They let the sun warm their skin.

  ‘I think you were right. This is difficult, but it also feels quite wonderful.’

  ‘It does.’ She agreed. ‘There is something about the gentle rocking of a boat. I have always thought so.’

  ‘There is.’ He yawned. ‘I’m exhausted,’ James confessed. ‘I am always exhausted, but it’s been one hell of a day. Who am I kidding? It’s been one hell of a week, month, year . . .’

  ‘It has. Go to sleep, James,’ she cooed, reaching out and smoothing his hair from his handsome face, savouring the feel of his skin beneath her fingertips; once so familiar, it now felt like something brand new. He raised his hand and touched her fingers with an expression of pure sorrow, almost as if the sweet longing for what they had once shared flared in his mind, as it did hers. She watched the furrows on his brow disappear under her gentle touch.

  ‘I don’t like to nap and leave you here with no one to talk to.’ As he spoke, his face fell to one side. Sleep began to claim him.

  ‘I’ll be right by your side.’ She leaned forward and kissed his cheek, an act once so commonplace, but today it was quite distinct. It was the sweet, sweet kiss of goodbye.

  Rachel sat up straight. She pictured her parents probably in their little breakfast nook in Yate and she sent them thoughts.

  I love you both, I do, and I want to thank you. Thank you for always being there for me. I know you will understand. I know that you cannot envisage a life without Peter and me and that is the life I face – one without my boy – and it’s not a life I want. And not a life I choose. She took a deep breath and felt nothing but a beautiful sense of calm. And you, Vicky, my best, best friend, be strong and grab all that life throws at you. You will watch Francisco grow into a wonderful little man, just like his dad, and know that I have always treasured you. Always.

  This was it; the conclusion to this terrible chapter and with it an end to the suffering, the pain, the insomnia, the desperation.

  Rachel felt a sense of peace and a flicker of something close to euphoria.

  She had figured it out.

  She watched as James lay back and before too long the twitch of his limbs stilled and his chest rose and fell with the deep, deep breathing of sleep.

  Rachel knew time was of the essence. She stood slowly and would have found it hard to describe the serenity in which she found herself bathed, body and soul. It was a new and welcome peace. There was no fear. There was no hesitation; just a sense of calm resignation that had been missing from her life for so long. It gave her clarity and for that she was grateful. She trod softly to the back of the boat and took two, then three steps to the edge, and as quietly as she could, she lifted first one foot over the guardrail and then the other. Glancing quickly at the foredeck to check that her husband hadn’t stirred, she took a deep breath and looked forward.

  Rachel Croft jumped.

  The water was colder than she would have anticipated and certainly than she remembered. She plummeted down beneath the surface, dropping until she reached a point where her body hovered and her natural instinct was to kick her feet, pull with her arms and go back to the top. But this instinct, she knew, was one to fight against. The water was a little foamy around her point of entry, and she instantly lost her bearings.

  Not that it mattered.

  Nothing mattered now.

  With her hair floating all around, she opened her eyes and, bar the sting of salt, was able to see quite clearly. She felt the air that had filled her lungs start to run out and she turned in the water, with her head down, preparing to dive deeper to take one.

  Final.

  Big.

  Breath.

  Her chest started to burn and she fought to control the rise of panic in her body, which despite her mind’s steely intention had yet to catch up. Rachel floated in a star formation beneath the water. She hovered in the sea, waiting for the moment when her body would do what had come naturally to her since the moment she had been born: take a breath. But this breath would be her last, making her one with the ocean that had claimed her boy.

  The desire to breathe was strong and getting stronger.

  Two things happened simultaneously. As Rachel opened her mouth to let water stream into her lungs, she saw a flicker of light in the distance. Her eyes narrowed and widened, and there, almost within touching distance, she saw Oscar! It was him! Oscar!

  Her heart lifted and her spirit soared with joy.

  She saw his face, his beautiful, beautiful face.

  He looked directly at her and he smiled his cheeky grin. She took in his little straight nose, dotted with freckles, just as she remembered it. His fair hair sat around his head like a halo and as he turned in the water to dive deeper, Oscar looked back over his shoulder and waved.

  Rachel used the last of her strength to lift her hand and waved back at her boy, who was spirited away beyond her gaze.

  As deep as the ocean, Oscar, and as high as the sky. I am with you and I will always love you. Always.

  A sharp, violent yank pulled her upward, a force so strong that she had no option in her weakened and disorientated state but to go with it. Her head broke the surface and she was aware of James yelling, ‘No! Don’t you fucking dare! Don’t you dare! Don’t you do that to me, Rachel! No fucking way! No way! Stay with me, you fucking stay with me!’ he screamed in her face, crying, dragging her through the water, pulling her hair and anchoring her head to him under the chin, as he kicked backward towards the hull of Liberté.

  She began to cough, a brutal cough that drew water from her lungs, leaving her retching and hacking until she had cleared her airways and was left gasping for breath. James hung on to the ladder at the back of the boat and caught his breath, crying, as she clung to him. ‘I saw him, James!’ she struggled to speak through her tears. ‘I saw him! I saw him. And he looked . . . He looked happy!’ She sobbed, as she bobbed in the cool Atlantic. ‘I saw him! I saw him!’

  James wrapped his free arm around her and held her close as they both concentrated on breathing between bouts of sobbing.

  ‘He’s not here any more, Rachel. He is gone! He died! He is dead . . . He’s dead and you need to let him go! I can’t stand it any more! He is dead! And you need to let him go. He is not in a cave or with a kelpie; he is not coming back, not ever! Please. Please,’ he shouted before the next bout of tears robbed him of the means to speak. The two bereft parents clung to each other in the ocean, wet clothes now weighing heavily on their skin.

  ‘I know,’ she whimpered. ‘I know! I know! I know! I know!’ she cried loudly, with her head tipped back in the water, shrieking for the whole world to hear as she howled at the big blue sky. She screamed and raged until she thought her lungs might burst.

  Finally, righting herself, she placed her hands on her husband’s f
ace and fixed him with her stare. ‘I have always known! He died, James! He died, didn’t he? My little boy. Oscar. He died. He’s dead. He’s dead. I know it, he’s dead and he’s not coming home! He’s not ever coming home . . .’

  Rachel and James sat quietly on the foredeck with the duvet cast over their legs, until their clothes and bodies dried in the failing embers of the sun and they succumbed to stupor, quite exhausted by the events of the day. She took a deep breath and closed her stinging eyes.

  ‘Thank you for coming after me.’ Her voice was a husky rasp through a throat sore from screams and sea water.

  ‘I’ll always come after you, Rachel, always. That’s a given.’

  They watched the sun begin to sink.

  ‘Did you . . . did you want to die?’ he asked with a catch to his voice.

  ‘I think I did at that moment,’ she confessed, and it was a hard admission to make.

  ‘And what about at this moment? Or in a moment tomorrow or the day after?’

  Rachel shook her head. ‘I can’t lie, James, over the last few months I have always felt it was an option if things got too much for me to handle – a last-resort option, but an option nevertheless. But I have never planned it or truly considered how until this afternoon. I might have mentioned it vaguely to Cee-Cee but she just got angry, dismissive, and I get why.’

  ‘Because she loves you?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, because she understands that it’s selfish and it causes ripples that are far, far reaching. We know this.’

  ‘Yes.’ He sighed.

  ‘And she told me that things get better.’

  ‘Do you believe her?’

  ‘I don’t know. I want to.’ She picked at the edge of her T-shirt.

  ‘Me too.’ He looked out over the horizon. ‘I can’t live like this, Rach. I can’t do it any more. I know I can’t make you happy and I don’t know how to help you. I don’t even know how to help myself.’

  ‘I know.’

  Their conversation was calm, rational; gone was the whiff of hysteria that had book-ended all their exchanges for the last few weeks.

  James continued. ‘I don’t know what the answer is. I try to think of it, but I keep going around and around in circles and every possible idea leads me back to that moment when we realised he had gone, and the pain is real and fresh every single time.’

  She sat up and wrapped her arms around her raised knees. It was as if the fog lifted and she had clarity of sight and mind that had been missing for some time.

  ‘I can’t go through that again, what you did today . . .’ He sighed.

  ‘I can’t either. I need to break the cycle for us both.’ She nodded. ‘I need to leave, James. I need to get away from Bermuda. I am unravelling. I have bad thoughts about everything.’

  She watched his mouth fall open, as if in shock, and he took a second to compose himself. ‘I thought you were going to suggest we go to counselling or, or have a break or something, but you are going to leave me, leave Bermuda?’ His tone was incredulous, eyes narrowed and a catch to his throat.

  ‘I need to leave everything. I need to leave this!’ She threw her arm around in an arc. ‘I don’t want to be wandering around with a face that could curdle milk in my seventies still wondering, still watching the bloody sea! I can’t do it! I need to figure out how to be . . . how to be without him.’

  ‘And without me,’ he whispered.

  She looked at him, wanting for words.

  It would only be later that she reflected on the fact that bar voicing his surprise, he had offered no real resistance, made no suggestion to the contrary. He hadn’t fought for her. This only added weight to her decision; it was what they both needed. Time apart to think clearly, to shake off the wearying shackles of grief that bound them to this place and to that point in time, when she had popped the kettle on the hob and casually wandered the boat, looking for her boy.

  Rachel stood on the balcony and looked out over the ocean. Cee-Cee stepped from the bedroom and stood by her side. ‘The taxi will be here in half an hour.’

  ‘Thank you, Cee-Cee. I am really going to miss you.’

  ‘As God is my witness, I will do my best to care for Mr Croft. So try not to worry. I will keep you in my prayers.’

  ‘Thank you. I can’t quite believe that I won’t be seeing you both every day, but James and I are so broken, Cee-Cee, misshapen and I think if I stay here I might lose my mind.’ It was a stark admission that she wasn’t sure she had voiced out loud.

  ‘I understand. More than you know.’

  ‘Did you ever feel like you might lose your reason?’ She turned to look at the woman who had outwardly kept this ship running when they had come aground.

  ‘Yes.’ She gave a single nod. ‘And then one day, like you, I realised that I needed to navigate this new life. Start over. You need to find a way, like I did. Mine is not a life I would have chosen, but it’s my life and that’s all there is to it.’ She folded her hands together. ‘And I do believe that my time, my sadness, is part of a bigger plan – God’s plan – and therefore I am not meant to always understand it.’

  Rachel gave a wry sideways smile. Oh, for the comfort of believing in heaven and hell; how much would that faith ease her burden? She gathered her thoughts.

  ‘Truth be known, I have started to feel angry. I had everything, everything. My James and my baby boy. That was all I needed, all I could ever need.’ She considered this. ‘And this new world of grief, this changed existence, was given to me in a split second and I didn’t ask for it!’ She shook her head. ‘I’m angry at the world, Cee-Cee.’ She swallowed the emotion that threatened. ‘It doesn’t matter how many times I play it over in my head; I can’t understand how it’s all gone, in just the blink of an eye. And I struggle with the fact that there is absolutely nothing I can do, because that world with my James and my boy – it doesn’t exist any more.’

  Cee-Cee lifted her chin and looked Rachel in the eye. ‘That is about the sum of it. Yes.’

  ‘You said once that things will get better. Does it hurt any less?’ She watched Cee-Cee swallow as she reached out and ran her fingers over her cheek. Rachel welcomed her touch.

  ‘Things will get better, child, but no. No, it does not hurt any less.’ The woman spoke flatly. ‘I wish I could tell you otherwise. I wish I knew how to construct a lie that might sweeten your sleep, but I don’t know how.’

  Rachel felt the crush of disappointment underpinned by a melodious note of thanks at the fact that Cee-Cee hadn’t felt the need to feed her a false cliché. She also felt some kind of relief that this tie to Oscar, this wearying yoke of grief she carried was not going to ease, as anything less, whilst it would be a more pleasant way to live, might dilute the strength of feeling she had for him and that would never do. Her pain kept her grief sharp, kept him in focus.

  ‘So what happens from here onwards?’ She hardly dared ask. ‘How do you go on?’

  Cee-Cee shrugged and drew breath, drawing her cardigan around her form.

  ‘The fog of grief never lifts.’ She shook her head. ‘Never. But you find a way to travel through it, see beyond it, almost. There are times – most days, if not every day – when something stops me in my tracks and knocks the breath from my lungs and it’s all I can do not to topple over. That still happens, even now, and I know it always will, but it’s not raw, not physically painful like it used to be. I have got used to it and therefore know how to manage it. It is like a large chunk of me is missing and I had to adapt and figure out how to exist without it. I have somehow learned to forge a path forward. But I can’t lie: my boy still sits behind my eyelids and lies curled in the palm of my hand.’

  Rachel closed her fingers; this she understood.

  Cee-Cee looked out to the horizon. ‘And with each year that passes, the small details have faded almost in response to how hard I try to remember them and that is a new, fresh pain all of its own.’

  ‘Torture.’ Rachel offered up the word
. ‘I know what you mean. I can only think about Oscar’s hair when he was a baby. It slipped through my fingers like silk, too insubstantial to grip, like something otherworldly: silky, thin, fairy-like. And its colour! Not one colour at all, but light brown with streaks of pure gold and pale yellow. All the colours of an autumn palette captured in those fine strands. This is what I do now. I remember him piece by piece, like the curator of something rare and fading, who needs to catalogue each tiny element, preserving it in memory. And it’s a race against time. I’m fearful I might . . . I might forget one tiny dimple above the knuckle of his toddler hand, or the slight lift to the outside arch of his right brow. And to forget these details? Not to have him preserved in my memory, complete, recreated in every single detail? Oh my God! That thought, that very idea is so horrific because that would be the beginning. The beginning of the end of forgetting every single bit of him and that would kill me. It would kill me.’

  ‘Yes, torture,’ Cee-Cee agreed. ‘But there is one irrefutable fact and that is that life does go on. It goes on for the world Oscar was part of and it goes on for you.’

  Rachel looked at the woman whose words were a balm of sorts. ‘I . . . I am not always sure I want my life to go on.’ She thought of James yanking her from the water.

  ‘Hmph.’ Cee-Cee made a noise. ‘It is not about what you want or even what you need, it is about how it is. You are not the first and you won’t be the last and all you can do is make it part of your story and as I said, try to navigate your way through the fog.’

  I know I won’t be the first or last, but I can’t believe anyone has ever felt this depth of sorrow and survived. I hope I have your strength, Cee-Cee. She looked down.

  ‘You feel unique, and of course the way you hurt is just that, but let me tell you that while you mourn your boy, I give nothing but thanks for him. He was a shining light, helping me on my journey. He brought me pure joy! An old woman, a stranger, and yet he gave me more happiness than I had any right to expect.’

  Rachel smiled at the thought of this; she pictured Oscar laughing, as he jumped into the pool, landing on his inflatable shark with precision, gripping with his arms and legs. A rare feat topped and tailed by many big-splash failures.