Rachel again paused and took a sharp breath, it was simply too painful a thing to consider.
But for me it was not to be.
Life, Clara, Willard Senior and the Lord Jesus had other plans for me.
When the grief of losing my boy settled a little and the God Almighty took away some of my upset, I didn’t want anything nasty in my core. I figured I had enough to deal with without heaping anger and resentment for the state of my world on top of it. I was mindful of that pit in the plum pudding.
I think it was Albert Romsey who broke the news to me – yes, it was him who told me what many already knew and others surely suspected. All, that was, except me, who was preoccupied with my own troubles. I do remember laughing quite heartily as Albert spoke, and that laugh was as much a surprise to me as it was to him. Not that anything about his words on that day was in the least bit funny, no. I think it must have been nerves that got the better of me.
But I do remember as clear as day leaving church and blinking as my eyes adjusted to the bright, blue day, in contrast to the dark interior of St Anne’s. I shook Pastor Raymond’s hand and loitered on the dusty path of the graveyard, waiting for Grandma Sally, who liked to talk and hang back in the aisle. She always saw our days of worship as something very social.
Albert strolled over in a fashion that did nothing to suggest urgency, and I thought he was going to enquire how I was doing or talk about the weather. On reflection, I am glad he spoke the words directly to my face. I figured two gut punching notes were more than most had to deal with, and truly I don’t know how I would have handled a third.
Instead of chatting about the topics mentioned above and with his tone as bold and plain, he said, ‘I guess you already know that Willard lives with Clara, backatown.’ It was then that I laughed before cupping my hand over my nose and mouth. ‘My Clara?’ And it was only after that I realised what I had said – not ‘my Willard?’ I knew she was the greater loss, the one whose betrayal hurt me more because she was my best friend, and what kind of best friend, indeed what kind of friend, would hold me in such low regard as to go after the only man I loved? That still mystifies me and hurts me in equal measure. As for Willard? He was just a dumb thing, led around – too stupid to know when he had it good and too stupid to know what he had lost. But Clara? I thought she was better. And the very thought of her doing that to me, it still cuts me to the core.
You know, strangely, the knowledge that Clara and Willard lived in sin together only a mile or so away from where I laid my head on my pillow each and every night was hard to bear at first, but with my head and heart full of thoughts of Willard Junior, it quickly faded to the background of my mind, where it sat for many years.
I stayed about as far away from them both as I could. I saw Momma Eula a couple of times strolling up in St George around the harbour and we were pleasant to each other. But neither of us uttered the word that had been our glue for so many years. ‘Clara.’ Both of us, I would say, were relieved when we had made comment on the weather and I had agreed to pass on my very best wishes to Grandma Sally and we were able to part and carry on with our day. Looking back, I suppose Momma Eula might have had a slight shiver to her eye, as if shamed by the goings-on on her very doorstep, and I must confess to thinking she should have a shiver in her eye, because if it was me that had chosen to live in such a way within sight of my mommy’s house then she would surely beat me with the yard broom all the way down the street until I saw sense. But I had heard it said that Momma Eula never did know much about right and wrong.
I remember like it was yesterday the day I saw Willard Senior again. It was only a glance at first, one tiny sighting of a familiar shape and colour that told me he was close. I felt him before I saw him; as those of us who have ever loved will testify, it can be the way with someone whose heart has known your own.
I was walking around the Flatts Inlet when I spied him ahead of me on the path. I watched how he raised his hand and flicked his head towards a man fixing a fishing net on the shoreline. A gesture of greeting unique to him, part nod, part tilt of the chin, equally welcoming and dismissive; it was one his tricks. No matter that it had been over two years since the breath had caught in my throat and my heart danced an unusual rhythm; it was as if that time had been erased. Things I had quite forgotten were suddenly prevalent. I was once again engulfed in the heady scent of his aroma that seemed to dance back under my nose, carried on the shifting breeze. I remembered in that moment what it had felt like to be in love and to be loved, at a time when desire was wrapped in innocence and manifested in our desperate kissing wherever and whenever possible. The Lord knows I knew such contentment under the heavy, embroidered Portuguese shawl on the bed in Grandma Sally’s back bedroom and I lived with the promise of a rosy future. So close I could almost touch it. That future shone like an orb, always slightly out of reach, for me, at least.
I stood still on that path like prey unsure whether it had been spotted, hoping that if I stayed still enough, no one would notice me. Him included. I didn’t dare breathe. I looked down at my scruffy pinafore and cursed that I had not put on better clothes or combed my hair, not that I would have done either for him, no sir, it was all about me. As if alerted by my change in rhythm, a disturbance in the air around him, he turned and I saw his big brown eyes, which held more than a glint of fear, and Lord forgive me, but I was glad.
He walked quickly towards me and I looked left and right to see where I might run to, but I was hemmed in on both sides by boats and buildings. There was nowhere for me to go. I made my hands into fists and with my arms straight I kept them by my side, trying to still their shake. He stood not a foot from me, skinnier than I remembered and with the corner of his front tooth now chipped and gone. But otherwise he looked the same.
When he spoke, his words were a shock, softly delivered, and yet they hit me like an axe to the heart. Just three words. ‘Did he suffer?’
And without having to enquire, I knew who he spoke about and I got the feeling that not only had that question been sitting on his tongue for a good while, but that this thought might be bothersome to him, and in truth, yet again, I was glad. I didn’t forgive him, not one tiny inch, but it made me feel like someone else cared about my baby boy, and it made me feel like I was not going through it all alone, and both of these things were, at the time, mightily welcome.
‘I don’t think so,’ I answered as truthfully as I knew how, trying to rid my mind of my son’s stiff little limbs and that foamy spit at the side of his perfect lips.
‘Willard Junior, named after his daddy.’ He spoke with more pride than he had any right to express. ‘Time will heal. Time will heal.’ He held my gaze and swallowed, and then it was like he couldn’t stand to look into my eyes any longer and he looked down at his feet. ‘He was a fine baby,’ he whispered with a twist of emotion on his lying mouth.
Not that he lied then.
And try as I might and as much as I wanted to be brave, I could not stop my hot tears that sprang.
He spoke only the holy truth.
My baby boy was fine!
Oh Rachel, as God is my witness.
He really was.
And strangely, Willard was right. Time did heal, a little, enough for me to carry on, just . . .
Rachel folded the letter and placed it back in her pocket. She cried for the sadness her friend had endured and she cried for the loss of her. She thought of Willard Senior and wondered at his pain, she then immediately thought of James, who she would be seeing very soon.
It was a little under eight hours later that Rachel found herself in the line at passport control, snaking slowly through the arrivals of L. F. Wade International Airport. She had forgotten exactly what the high level of humidity felt like and also the fact that the air conditioning here was not the most effective. Sweat pooled on her back and chest. She felt the jump of impatience in her gut, knowing her husband was on the other side of the wall. And at this thought her stomach flipped, send
ing a bloom of nausea through her core. She was nervous. Hemmed in by tourists fanning their faces with their passports, she listened to the excited burble of anxious holidaymakers, the noise sat over their heads in a cloud of chatter.
She remembered her first time on the island and how she and James had driven in near silence with Oscar on the back seat, taken aback, stunned and on edge until they arrived at their new home and that glorious moment they stepped out on to the terrace off their bedroom. Didn’t I promise you paradise? he whispered in her ear, as Oscar ran around. Fearless.
Having grabbed her case from the carousel, she walked through the double doors and out on to the main concourse. She saw James instantly, programmed to recognise the shape of him in any crowd. The man she was married to looked a little different in real life from the person who lived in her mind. He was smaller and looked older. His muscles had shrunk, his skin a little greyer, looser, his stature diminished, no doubt by grief, and she suspected that, like her, he no longer had any interest in anything as superfluous as his appearance. He was in his jeans and a pale-blue shirt; a belt cinched in his waist and his cheeks were drawn. He needed a haircut. Her stomach rolled at the sight of his face, so familiar – the face she had loved for so much of her life. The father of her child.
There you are . . .
They both walked forward, meeting somewhere in the middle, and instantly they assumed the position that was as natural to them as breathing. James placed his arms around her shoulders and she looped hers around his lower back, resting her head on his chest. This was how they had danced their first dance at their wedding reception, encircled by the smiling faces of all the people who loved them. This was also how they loved, hugging at the start and end of the working day, and this was how they had grieved when James held her and lied, telling her everything was going to be okay.
She inhaled the scent of him and took comfort from it, and he used a single finger to draw her fringe from her face, as he often did.
‘Here you are.’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Here I am.’
The car made steady progress on the almost-empty roads and they were at ease with each other, comfortable. She had forgotten the freedom of movement on the island where traffic was tightly controlled and you were more likely to encounter mopeds than anything else. It was very different from the congestion of Bristol, where traffic sat nose to tail to travel no more than a few miles – the busy city where cyclists ducked and weaved in and out of buses and cars whose drivers honked their tinny horns in frustration. Pretty soon they were on the Causeway, a wide sweep of road with the pale ocean reaching out on either side with sparkling white yachts moored and bobbing on the swell, and before she knew it they were skirting Flatts Village.
‘God, James, I’d forgotten how beautiful it is. How blue.’ Rachel felt confused. Flames of joy leaped in her gut at being back in this most magical of settings, but then the memory of her life here in those last months swept away the joy, leaving something closer to horror in its place.
‘How’re your mum and dad?’
‘The same. You know.’ She looked at him and he smiled.
‘And your brother?’
‘Still a knob.’ She liked the way his mouth lifted as she used his phrase to echo her own sentiments.
‘I figured as much.’
‘Poor Cee-Cee. I am sad about her; so sad.’
She realised that her friend had been right when she recalled the loss of her parents and others she loved: While those deaths were sad, they were nothing compared to losing Willard Junior. He was my life, you see . . .
I understand this, Cee-Cee. I do.
James sighed. ‘Yes. I miss her. I wasn’t expecting it and I had very much got used to her being around.’
She spoke softly. ‘And the funeral is in three days?’
‘Yes. At St Anne’s.’
‘Do they know why she died?’
‘I think just old age, no one has said anything else.’
‘That’s a nice way to go, I think. To fall asleep in your own bed.’
She swallowed, inevitably thinking of their boy who was denied that chance; the punch of grief to her chest was just as powerful now as it had always been. Again she blinked away the uninvited images that crowded her mind, preferring instead to see her boy leaping from the diving board into the pool with a smile on his face and his nose peppered with freckles.
‘She was good to us and she has been wonderful to me these last few months. She’d leave me notes and supper and if I didn’t eat it, I’d get another note the next day, but that one a little more stern about my need to eat.’
‘I am grateful to her.’ She felt awkward, as if these words were somehow an admission of her dereliction of their marriage, hinting at the regret she felt at having abandoned him. Not that she wouldn’t do the exact same again; her choice to go away had come from a place far beyond reason. ‘She loved us,’ Rachel surmised, ‘and she loved Oscar.’
There, she had done it. She had said his name, broken the glass wall of anticipation as they waited to see who would do it and how.
‘She did.’ He swallowed. ‘I used to talk to her about him and it helped.’
‘I still find it hard to talk about him most of the time.’ It was a difficult, shameful admission.
‘I don’t so much. Cee-Cee said something – she said that if we stop talking about him, stop using his name, then not only will others not learn about him and think of him, but if no one says their name, that’s when someone really dies. It made me think.’
‘I’ll try harder to do that,’ she offered sincerely, knowing that to talk about him freely would be hard, but to let him disappear, unmentioned altogether? That would be far, far worse.
‘You don’t have to try, Rach; you don’t have to force anything. You just need to keep healing, one day at a time, and I bet you will find one day that you can talk about him openly and remark on things without it cutting you so deeply. It might actually make you feel happy to remember him and not sad.’
She nodded, not sure if this would ever be the case, but recognising the cruel irony that all aspects of her beautiful boy were overshadowed by the way he was lost. Terrible, terrible minutes, but mere minutes nonetheless, that had come to define seven whole years of life.
The car pulled up at the gates of the house on North Shore Road and Rachel felt a wave of familiarity and warmth at the sight of the place she had lived with her family. The pool and gardens were magnificent when seen through eyes that had been absent for some time and were now more used to surveying the grey damp pavements of a crowded city.
James grabbed her case and pushed open the front door. She was quite taken aback, having forgotten the vast proportions of the house. She pictured the narrow hallway of her parents’ little house in Yate, and how to pass each other you had to breathe in and skim the wall. She was also struck by how quiet it was, cool despite the heat of the day, and strangely empty without Oscar’s yells in play or the hum of his favoured cartoons providing the background noise to their lives. And now there was no Cee-Cee opening and closing doors, humming a hymn or singing loudly when she thought no one could hear.
A house of ghosts.
‘I’ll take your bag up.’
She noted the swallow to his throat and realised that there was the awkward matter of where she would sleep. It was as sad as it was jarring that they, as a married couple, had reached this point where it could not be assumed that she would take up her space in their marital bed.
‘Thank you.’ She held his eyeline. ‘I could never have imagined feeling this way with you.’
‘What way?’ He hovered on the wide bottom stair, gripping the curve of the bannister with his free hand.
Rachel shrugged and folded her arms across her chest. ‘Like I’m meeting someone I don’t know very well, like going to stay with a distant relative and nervous about being around. Worried that we might not have anything to say to each other. Whether it’s oka
y to make a coffee, kick off my shoes; worried about where I might sleep.’
She saw his crestfallen expression and the way his whole body seemed to fold. He took a step back and abandoned the suitcase.
‘Please don’t feel that way.’ He reached for her and pulled her into his chest once more. ‘Please, Rachel. You are all I have left and the thought that you feel that way is just about more than I can stand. This is your home and you are my wife!’ His voice caught in his throat.
‘I can’t help it.’ Her voice was muffled against his chest. She felt the desperation in his grip and it threatened to overwhelm her. It was a hard thing to accept, but she realised that in the months in which she had been gone, she had got used to being without him.
‘I know.’ He kissed her scalp. ‘And we are strange. Everything is strange.’
‘I still feel like I am only just hanging on,’ she began, hoping he might understand that she was still so fragile, messed up. ‘In some ways I’m a lot better than I was, but it’s not that I am healed; it’s just that I am better at blending in with what other people expect. I’m better at hiding my hurt.’
She felt him nod his understanding.
‘Come upstairs with me,’ he whispered. Her body stiffened and he clearly felt it. ‘I . . . I just want to hold you and I just want you to hold me.’
He reached for her hand and led her up the stairs. They walked slowly, both instinctively pausing as they passed Oscar’s bedroom.
‘Can I look inside?’ She bit her lip, scared.
‘Of course you can.’ Again he looked hurt that she felt the need to ask.
He went ahead and opened the door. Rachel stepped inside and was pleased to see that everything was exactly how she had left it, how Oscar had left it. Cee-Cee had kept it clean, tidy and aired, and again she threw her thanks out into the universe. She walked to the chest of drawers and opened up the third drawer from the bottom where all his pyjamas were folded neatly and sat side by side, awaiting a warm little body that would languish in them on the sofa, with hair mussed from sleep, kicking his bare feet and eating cereal by the handful. She placed her hand inside and let her fingertips caress the soft cotton that had known the feel of his skin.
The Coordinates of Loss Page 26