Now Is Our Time

by Jo Kessel

  “Life’s not fair,” Claire whispered.

  “And life’s too short,” replied Jonah. “Stuff like this reminds one to seize each day and live for the moment.”

  Claire inhaled deeply, closing her eyes as she did so, trying to calm down. Chad and Ben would be here any minute and she needed to pull herself together. The last thing she felt like doing was a live broadcast, but to coin one of Orlando’s favourite phrases, the show must go on.

  “He wants me to help him fight this with food,” Claire told Jonah, “but that’s impossib -

  A stabbing pain shot across Claire’s lower abdomen, stopping her in her tracks.

  “Are you ok?” checked Jonah.

  She nodded, planting a hand over her tummy to massage away the thud.

  “It’s nothing,” she said.

  It actually hurt like hell but, compared to Orlando’s predicament, a touch of belly ache was insignificant. To complain felt wrong.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  JONAH

  “Right little ladies,” said Jonah at the precise moment that Miriam and Martha decided to perform a synchronised jump into the pool, showering him with spray. Using the end of the white towel slung around his neck he wiped his eyes and waited for the girls to surface. “You’ve got half an hour to decide what you’d like to do today and my challenge will be to see if I can combine all three of our ideas. Got it?”

  “Got it,” said the girls.

  “Be good,” said Jonah, “I’m watching you.”

  The complex had a small but well-equipped gym which overlooked the pool. Its position enabled Jonah to keep an eye on the girls while he worked out. Most days he liked to run on the treadmill for half-an-hour followed by a few minutes lifting weights. He’d been forced to relax his regime whilst he was in the UK but, even then, when he could he’d snatch a few moments in the hotel gym. You can’t go from being a professional athlete, training for eight hours a day, to doing absolutely nada. Well, you could, but it wouldn’t feel good.

  He threw his towel onto a bench, switched on the treadmill and started with a gentle jog as he watched the girls practicing their dives. Jonah couldn’t have been happier with how things were panning out. Claire was under the impression that nothing ever scared him but she was wrong. Scared wasn’t quite the word he would use but he’d certainly been concerned about how his daughter would react to Claire and Miriam trespassing on her turf, day in, day out. Martha was an only child used to getting her own way and her mother’s style of parenting was questionable at best. Much to Jonah’s dismay, she’d always pandered to their daughter’s every whim and spoiled her rotten, but that was the problem with divorce. When your child is in the other parent’s charge, you’re impotent. He’d observed Martha playing with friends and she wasn’t a great sharer, which had boded badly for the introduction of potential step- siblings. And so he’d waited with bated breath for tantrums and the green-eyed monster to rear their ugly heads but so far so good. In fact, so far it had been an unexpected breeze. True, the girls had had their fair share of squabbles and that was only to be expected. Goddamn, even siblings can fight the hell out of each other. But Martha and Miriam’s tiffs were all short-lived and inconsequential. They were largely TV focused. Who should have possession of the remote control, what programme should they watch, that sort of trivial nonsense. Claire was always quick to break up the fight and referee it fairly. She was a fantastic mother. Watching her interact with the girls had deepened his love and respect for her even further.

  He’d not mentioned it to Claire for fear she’d give him some health and safety lecture but, the other day he’d found the girls in one of their rooms huddled round Martha’s sewing box. She’d taken a pin and they were both pricking their fingers and holding their wounds against one another’s. “Now we’re proper sisters,” Martha said. “Blood sisters,” Miriam declared. There’d also been a lot of mattress shifting. One night, about a week into the stay, Martha had invited Miriam to sleep in her room. The next night it had been vice versa. On the third night something very interesting had happened which Jonah felt, on some social, anthropological and psychological level had a greater meaning than he could ever fathom. They had both moved their mattresses into the spare room. The ‘blue’ room as Miriam called it, and that’s where they’d slept. And now, whenever they chose to sleep together, it was in this new, neutral territory that they convened.

  Splash, bomb and dive: three more children joined the girls in the pool and Miriam showed them how to do underwater handstands and somersaults. A few seconds later her head bobbed back out of the water as she held her nose. “Say bairth,” one of the girls told her. “Barth,” said Miriam. They all giggled. “Now say hart,” said one of the other girls. “Hot,” said Miriam. Now they were all laughing and trying out the different versions of the words, the American youngsters seeing if they could sound British. Amused, Jonah chuckled to himself.

  He didn’t mind the days Claire worked at all. He enjoyed having the girls to himself and he was pretty sure that they had a good time too. This was the third Monday that she was out filming and time was passing way too quickly. In just over a week Miriam’s father would be coming to pick up his daughter as would Martha’s mom.

  The girls were all having such a good time in the pool that Jonah managed to eek an extra ten minutes to work on his triceps. “Tom – ay – tow,” the girls were saying to Miriam as Jonah left the gym. “Say ‘tom – ay – tow’.” Miriam copied their accents and sounded wonderfully Californian as she did so. Again, Jonah smiled, wondering how pleased Claire would be if her daughter lost her British accent.

  “Very good Miriam,” he told her.

  “Really?” she asked, swimming up to the edge of the pool.

  “Yep, you sound 100% American.”

  Miriam looked pleased.

  “Right girls, have you decided what you want to do?”

  Martha came to join Miriam at the pool’s edge.

  “I want to go cycling,” she said.

  “I want to eat ice-cream,” said Miriam.

  Jonah nodded, contemplating.

  “Ok, we’ve got one ice-cream, one cycling and I want to go to the park.”

  “The park,” said Martha, looking sceptical.

  “Uh-huh,” said Jonah. “We all get one choice, no complaints.”

  “So where are we going then, what are we doing?” said Martha as she scrambled out the pool.

  “We’re doing cycling, ice-cream and park,” said Jonah, heading back towards the villa. “Come on now. Chop, chop.”

  As the girls followed him inside, he reminded himself that there was one more activity to add into the mix. Jonah had to stop at a pharmacy. Claire wasn’t herself since Orlando Goodman told her he had cancer and Jonah was starting to worry.

  ------------

  Claire had once told him, very proudly, that London had one of the greatest urban concentrations of parks in the world, if not the greatest concentration. The royal parks alone covered a whopping eight miles of green land and Jonah’s favourite was Hyde Park. He could get lost there for hours and its Serpentine Lake was truly a thing of great beauty. It was so quintessentially English that it reminded him of a Constable painting. You could hire boats by the hour to row on the water and he and Claire had done that, years ago. She’d been lazy, declaring her arms way too weak, and lay back basking in the sun whilst he put in the muscle power. “See, now you don’t have to go to the gym later,” she told him as she watched his triceps in motion. “I’ve done you a favour.” When the sun came out in Britain the colours were extraordinary and, the day that they’d rowed, Jonah remembered thinking the park had looked like a scene from Mary Poppins, the one where the characters hop into the painting. The green foliage and the cornflower blue sky had been so impossibly bright that the colours looked as if they’d been photo-shopped.

  But while Jonah loved the Serpentine, his favourite park had to be the one back home. San Diego’s Balboa Park was the bigges
t cultural urban park in the United States and he loved its variety. As well as housing the zoo, theatres, museums and gardens, it was also home to sixty-five miles of hiking and biking trails. So the fact that Martha had wanted to cycle today was a bonus. He could kill two birds with one stone by coming here.

  They’d stopped off twice en route, first at a deli where they’d bought freshly made sandwiches, iced cupcakes and drinks to take on a picnic and, next, at a bike rental hut. He and Martha already had wheels which were locked to the bike rack on the rear of his Porsche Cayenne, but Miriam needed kitting up. There was a gleaming pink model out front which was the right size and also had a front basket. That’s the one Miriam had picked. Jonah loaded up its basket with their feast and they set off down a six mile trail marked ‘golden hill’, bumping along a dirt track shaded by oak and eucalyptus towards the canyons. There were a fair few uphill sections which required some hard-core effort which left the girls panting, but they managed it and were impressed with their efforts when they looked back at the gradient of the slope they’d just climbed. They found a large, shady tree under which Jonah unfolded a rug he’d loaded in his backpack. They took the sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper out of Miriam’s bike basket, along with the sodas, and tucked in.

  Martha had pastrami as a filling, Miriam had picked turkey with coleslaw and Jonah had chosen salt beef.

  “Mm, this is good,” said Jonah, biting a massive chunk out of his roll.

  “Mine too,” said Martha appreciatively.

  “Jonah,” said Miriam, eyeing her sandwich but not yet eating it. “I was wondering, actually, err, we’ve been wondering, if you marry my mother then will Martha and I be, err, like, sort of, err sisters?”

  Jonah nearly choked on his salt beef, freezing mid-chew as he digested this direct question. He loved how children could throw such curve balls. Nothing was too embarrassing and there was no filter button. Was this question actually about the sisterhood thing or was it a clever way of getting into the marrying issue?

  Goddamn it, he wasn’t sure what to say. If Claire were sitting next to him what would she say? Miriam was capable of flustering him way more than his own daughter ever could. Be honest and just say it how it is. That’s what Claire would say, wasn’t it? Or would she dodge the issue? Marriage was a big word but not one he’d even discussed with Claire. And he certainly wasn’t going to let his thoughts be stolen by a nine-year old.

  He swallowed his mouthful with a hefty gulp of Dr. Peppers.

  “I guess that would make you sisters, yes.”

  “Cool,” said Martha, linking her little finger with Miriam’s.

  “How’s your sandwich?” Jonah asked Miriam, trying to change the subject, but she wasn’t having any of it. She stared him directly in the eye, as if daring him with her gaze.

  “So,” she asked. “Are you going to marry my mother?”

  ------------------

  Marriage wasn’t what was on Jonah’s mind as they steered towards the edge of the park. Think! Think! Think! He racked his brains. Where is there a chemist near to an ice-cream parlour? Wasn’t there one near to Mariposa Ice Cream? In summer they made this special watermelon sorbet which he always left to melt in the heat a little, so he could drink it. To hell whether there was a pharmacy or not next to it. Now that he had Mariposa in his head, that’s where they were going. The girls would love it.

  Claire’s stomach aches were becoming more frequent and whilst she kept brushing it off as nothing, he wasn’t convinced. The pain came and went, it wasn’t constant. Some days she was completely fine but, occasionally, when she didn’t think he was looking, he caught her doubling over and clutching the lower right part of her abdomen. Wasn’t that where the appendix was? Couldn’t a burst appendix kill you?

  “You really should see a doctor” he told her.

  “It’s just wind.” she reassured him. “I know my own body.”

  Well, if it really was wind, then he knew just the thing. His mother used to give him these little charcoal pills when he was a child which always did the trick.

  “Let’s park the bikes here,” he said as he caught sight of Adams Avenue.

  He chained the bikes up to a lamppost and they crossed the road. Yep, there was the pharmacy, two doors down, but first they made for the ice-cream parlour. Nobody could decide: white chocolate macadamia, white chocolate raspberry, heath butter toffee or maple walnut. They even made ice-cream pie, although that needed to be ordered a few days in advance. Eventually they all decided they were so hot that it had to be refreshing sorbet. Martha went for orange sherbet and mango, Miriam chose peach and pumpkin and Jonah inevitably selected the watermelon sorbet. No sooner had they got outside than the ice-cream started melting!

  “Girls, why don’t you stay here,” he suggested, handing Martha his cone. “I’ve got to go into the pharmacy for a minute and I don’t want these dripping everywhere.”

  Leaving them licking the damage from their cone stems and fingers, Jonah dashed into the chemist. He ran straight up to the pharmacy counter.

  “Do you still sell charcoal pills?” he asked. “I think the brand name is JJP.”

  The pharmacist disappeared and returned with a little grey plastic bottle in his hand.

  “Here you go sir,” he handed them over. “Work like magic.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  MIRIAM

  Grown-ups can be so stupid sometimes. That’s what Miriam was thinking as Jonah tried to sidestep her “Are you going to marry my mother” question. If grown-ups weren’t trying to prise information out of kids then they were trying to withhold it instead. Or trick them. Miriam’s mother was a prime example. The lengths she’d gone to, to hide the fact that she and Jonah were way more than just friends was laughable. The first night that Jonah had stayed with them at 77 Gladstone Road, Miriam had woken with the larks and had gone to check to see if her mother was awake yet. She’d found her mother’s bed empty but roughed up, as if she had been sleeping in it, and then she’d heard snoring from the spare room, a man’s snoring, a sound she was unfamiliar with. She’d pushed the door ajar to have a peek and that’s when she’d seen Jonah and her mum lying in bed together, really close, fast asleep in each other’s arms. It was actually rather cute and, bizarrely, the sight of them had made Miriam feel happy.

  Grown-ups think children don’t notice things, but they do. Miriam’s parents had never been particularly touchy-feely. Well, they were with her but not with each other. She couldn’t remember them kissing or cuddling or holding hands the way some of her friends’ parents did, so it hadn’t come as a complete surprise when they’d split up. Miriam hated the ‘D’ word, it felt like she’d been branded, the way she noticed sheep in fields that had letters inked on their curly white fur. She hoped the ‘D’ tag was a label that she could some day shake off.

  Her life had been turned so upside down by the ‘D’, that when her father had introduced Miriam to her new step-mother and step-brother, it hadn’t actually felt that odd. They’d all seemed very happy together, a proper family unit just like the one Miriam had been part of before. She’d felt a pang of jealousy for her brother but had swallowed it. He was very sweet and utterly blameless. Because her father had found happiness again, she wanted her mother to be happy too. She’d seen that her mother was tired and lonely, always putting Miriam first and saying that she was “the light in her life” and assuring her that that was enough. Miriam had felt certain that she’d needed more. Jonah was nice. She really liked him. And whilst she’d been shocked to stumble upon them sleeping so intimately, it had pleased her too. She hoped he’d stick around. She’d never seen her mother smile so much or laugh so much or look quite so pretty and sparkly as she did whenever he was around.

  The thing about the ‘D’ was that she had no control. No control over which parent she saw and when. No control over what she wanted to do because grown-ups made all the real decisions. And she had no control over her mother’s happiness. But as she�
�d pedalled uphill in Balboa Park she’d been toying with an idea. Perhaps she could have control over her mother’s happiness. Perhaps she was more powerful than she thought. The very concept had taken her mind off the pain in her thighs which felt as though they were circling through thick treacle as she conquered the steep slope. Whilst she’d watched Jonah shake the creases out of the green tartan picnic rug and smooth it flat under the branches of a tree, she dared herself to ask him the ‘M’ question. If she knew that he had every intention of sticking around then that would give her an element of control, both over her own life as well as over her mother’s.

  She kept willing herself to ask as they’d sat down and the other two had begun to un-wrap their sandwiches, but the words had become lodged in her throat. Then she’d counted down from three to one in her head and told herself that she must, absolutely must, ask that question after she reached number one. If she didn’t, she convinced herself that something bad would happen. That fear alone was enough to make her blurt out the words. She saw that the question made Jonah very uncomfortable and, much as she liked him, which she really did, making such an impact on him made her feel in control. That’s why she didn’t leave the matter alone. Her first attempt had been more cleverly couched, the question hidden in a ramble about whether Jonah marrying her mother would make her and Martha sisters. The second time round there was no side-stepping the issue.