Small Forgotten Moments

by Annalisa Crawford

  We don’t land. We fly forever.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I sketch our lives together, the images appearing in graphite lines and pastel shades. Page after page.

  Two little girls play on the beach at the tail end of summer. Two sisters jumping in and out of the soft waves crawling back and forth over the sand. Zenna and I, giggling as a surge catches us unaware and sweeps our legs from beneath us.

  Zenna swims to the rocks, our little fish. She’s at the very top of them and eyes me defiantly—she knows she’s being naughty. She’s testing me because Mum’s dozing on the sand under her big straw hat.

  I scramble across. No, I tell her. We’re not allowed to jump, it’s naughty and you’ll hurt yourself.

  My mother’s words parroted from my mouth.

  Zenna hesitates, her arms poised overhead in perfect diving position, and I don’t know what to do.

  Look at the rocks sticking out of the water, I say. If you hurt yourself, you won’t be able to go to ballet on Friday. I’m running out of reasons, but she hasn’t jumped—she’s waiting for a better one. Mummy said we can choose a cake on the way home, remember?

  She grins and climbs back down, jumping into my arms. For a six-year-old, she’s tiny, and I easily carry her all the way back to Mummy. I glance back at the rocks as Mum packs our picnic basket. I half-expect them to look different somehow, more ragged and sinister.

  ***

  The summer ends, and school starts again. New uniform—too big, with the starchiness of being unworn. For Christmas, I get a proper grown-up easel and paints you squeeze from the tubes. Zenna joins a swimming club. The year passes, another summer comes and goes. I move up to the big school. After several attempts, Zenna wins her first race and wants to be called Selena from now on. Her name starts to appear in local papers and her coach suggests she’s good enough to try out for the county team.

  I pass my exams with acceptable grades—not as high as Mum and Dad hoped, not as low as I feared. I get a place at art college. Selena passes hers with much better grades than me, and I go to university in London.

  Selena swims at national level while trying to keep her A-Levels going. In the end she has to choose, and she chooses swimming.

  I meet Nathan. I’m sitting beneath a tree on campus, eating lunch and sketching people. I’ve not made many friends, so I spend a lot of my time in this manner. He stands over me, casting a shadow, and says hello.

  On Selena’s eighteenth birthday, Mum gives her a sapphire pendant on a silver chain. It’s her birthstone. I’m a little envious because my birthstone is a pearl, and it reminds me of old ladies in tweed jackets, so my pendant is in my jewelry box and I only wear it at Christmas. This gift, around Selena’s neck, makes her eyes shine—it’s perfect for her.

  She joins the England swim team for the world championships. Nathan and I watch her compete in the rounds, and then the finals. I hold my breath as she inches closer and closer to the German woman in the lead. We’re in the stands with Mum and Dad and hug each other when she wins bronze in the 800m Freestyle.

  Months pass. Memories are made. I conduct my first post-university solo art exhibition to rave reviews. They’re abstract pieces, inspired by the Cornish coast. Next, I planned to work on some self-portraits, but they’re not going well—they don’t look like me. So I ditch them for something else.

  When we meet up, especially in London, we cause a stir—the famous swimmer and her emerging artist sister. We’re pictured in the tabloids leaving restaurants or waiting for trains, as though it’s somehow interesting or newsworthy.

  One day, she phones to tell me she’s met someone, and she’s pregnant. We go together to tell our parents—even though she’s twenty-four, she’s worried they’ll be angry. But they’re delighted. I wait a few months before I announce my engagement so I don’t overshadow her.

  I meet my nephew for the first time at my wedding. Selena is new-mum exhausted but smiles in the photos and dotes on her son. She’s already in training again, but it’s harder than she thought.

  We gather at Christmases and birthdays, weddings and Christenings—all the big ones.

  My art career develops with further exhibitions and worldwide sales. I have a child of my own and paint while he sleeps. After a raft of gold medals, Selena retires from swimming through injury and returns to Cornwall. She shrugs off our concern and claims it was the right time. When her son is five, she announces she’s single again and starts coaching the county swim team. Occasionally she’s asked to pundit on the BBC, and ends up doing Strictly Come Dancing, crashing out during movie week.

  I have another boy, and everyone asks when I’ll be trying for a girl.

  Sometimes I catch myself staring at Selena—in awe of her confidence and poise. I sketch her newly cropped hair and her fledgling wrinkles. You could make me a little younger, she remonstrates. But I think she’s beautiful just the way she is. She swims laps before the team starts training and meets a widower with an eight-year-old daughter.

  Years pass: memories are made. Nathan and I move back to Cornwall when we feel too old for the tumult of London. I’m comfortably famous.

  I’m forty, then fifty. The colors change—vibrant shades of red and orange become soft and calm. Our lives settle into an easy rhythm. My studio is a large room with doors opening onto a balcony. At the end of the day, Nathan brings glasses of wine and we sit out there, hand-in-hand.

  The boys grow up and leave home. Selena and I walk the coast path together and eat far too much cake at National Trust houses. Nathan and I travel.

  Dad dies at a good age. Selena and I take turns caring for Mum—going on daytrips and having her over for dinner. She’s lost without him, and a year later, she sits down to watch TV and doesn’t get up again.

  We’re in the rain beside her grave—our kids bear our weight, and we’re grateful we have each other. And afterwards, we sit together and remember.

  ***

  I draw these things, this life which never was, to make sense of it all. Page after page, from my hospital bed; my tribute to the girl who never grew up.

  When I was stretchered from the beach that harrowing day, weeks ago, they left Zenna behind. Both of us fell on the network of boulders designed to shore up the cliff face, our broken bodies tangled among the rocks, but only I was pulled out and swept away by the air ambulance—my leg shattered, my jaw and collarbone broken. I tried to tell them she was there, but she wasn’t anymore. She wasn’t inside me; she wasn’t anywhere.

  Lucky to be alive, they said. My leg is held together in a metal cage. My food is cut into tiny pieces before it comes to me; I need help guiding the fork to my mouth. Lucky, they said.

  It’s quiet without Zenna’s unremitting presence. Inside not out. Outside is full of all the usual commotion. Footsteps and conversations and trolleys and wheels and engines and purring and sirens and beeps and coughs. Each sound is an aria unfolding into a vibrant opera.

  She’s Selena now. My childhood name for her is sullied. Zenna is a relic, a fantasy torn from our symbiotic torture and buried at the bottom of the cliff. Selena is forever young and beloved, the victim of a tragic accident, to be remembered and mourned.

  I open the pad to the final page, blank and expansive, but I still don’t know what the final scene should be.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I’m allowed home on the day it snows. It starts with a flutter, caught on tree branches and the roofs of cars, dancing from the sky.

  Nathan says we should get a move on. He glances outside, frowning as the world turns gray and the snowfall intensifies. “It’s getting heavier.”

  “It won’t be snowing at Mum’s.”

  “It’s snowed on your beach before. I saw the pictures.”

  “Years ago.” I wasn’t there. I was in a bubble of amnesia, months away from drawing Zenna for the “first” time. But I saw the footage spread across the news. In another life, Selena, Mum, and I might have rushed down to the beach and thrown sn
owballs with our neighbors.

  “Yeah,” Nathan says, his attention divided between the clock on the wall and the flurry outside.

  The drive home is slow and steady. Nathan checks if I’m okay, if I’m comfortable, if I want the heating turned higher—an onslaught of politeness and awkwardness.

  We haven’t talked properly yet. A hospital ward isn’t the best place for a heart-to-heart, with the sound of Radio 4 interviews floating between our curtained-off cubicles and the distraction of nurses attending to my fellow patients. This is the first time we’ve been alone.

  He hurtled down from London when he heard about my accident. Not accident, I want to say. My fall, perhaps, my jump, my finale.

  He sat beside my bed while I drifted in and out of consciousness, imagining he was another delusion. He curled into the fetal position on pushed-together chairs in the waiting room until Mum persuaded him to go home with her. He was holding my hand when I regained full cognizance, when I realized he was exactly the person I wanted to see.

  Does it mean he still loves me? Does it mean I love him, or should love him, or owe it to him to love him? Do we pick up the wedding preparations from where we left them or shake hands and say goodbye?

  So many questions. No answers.

  The clouds darken; snow falls faster. It collects in mounds at the side of the road and obscures the pavements but lightens as we get closer to the coast—melting as it hits the road and turning to sludge on the windscreen. We sweep around the final corner onto the sea front, and my gaze is drawn to the water, to the frothing, foaming waves and the cloud-covered horizon.

  Nathan helps me out of the car and carries me up the steps from the road to Mum’s front lawn. So easy to skip up as a seven-year-old, challenging after my long overnight drive from London, impossible with an unwieldy cast and wayward crutches. He lifts me easily and hugs me tight against his chest.

  ***

  I wish everything was as neatly tied up as the life I drew for Selena. I turn the pages of the sketchpad and stare at her lined, matured face, and the streaks of gray I gave her for her fortieth birthday.

  With the injuries I sustained, I no longer resemble my own depiction. The book is a fiction for both of us. My left cheek is still slightly swollen, tight when I chew or speak; the bruises are Yellow Oxide, fading from their previous Vivid Lime Green. Deep, snaking scars where I hit the rocks are Naphthol Crimson, but they’ll lighten to silver eventually.

  In front of the mirror, I touch the glass rather than my own skin. Cold, smooth, perfectly formed glass.

  ***

  “I’d like to visit the cemetery,” I say at dinner. So far, we’ve adeptly avoided the subject. The longer Selena’s name is unspoken, the further away we push her.

  Mum and Nathan glance at each other, knives and forks set down. I cut my chicken into tiny pieces and pretend I can’t sense their hesitation.

  “Are you sure?”

  To lay flowers on the grave of my baby sister, of course I am. To visit the scene of such previous horror and torment, tangled with a malignant force, knowing I was on the way back to the place where my whole life would be wiped away again, I’m less certain.

  But I flash a smile and take a breath and say, “Yes. I want to.”

  The following day, we wrap up against the icy westerly wind. Nathan stays behind to cook dinner for our return. It’s Craig’s night off, so he’ll join us. He might arrive early, bringing leftover cheesecake from the pub, and they’ll have a beer together.

  It’s crisp when we get out of the car at the cemetery. Remnants of snow still gather in the roots of trees and around gravestones; it sparkles like magic in the sunlight. The serenity of the churchyard sweeps over us. The silence is punctuated with the rustle of branches and the faint chirping of birds. For the first time in months, I’m at peace.

  I hobble along, still not used to the concentration needed for crutches. They catch on weeds growing at the side of the path or where the root of a tree is lifting tarmac. The sun shines in defined lines through the clouds, hitting some of the newer white marble headstones so they glow like angels.

  Selena’s red granite stone, when we reach it, is tarnished and dull; the engraved script is obscured by small clumps of wilting brown moss.

  “Oh, my poor baby,” Mum says, crouching scratching the moss away and tracing the lettering with her finger. “I meant to come back sooner, but …”

  But her days and months passed as she picked up the pieces I’d left behind once more. And it was never the right moment, and her strength ebbed away. We all hid in our own way, from the past and the inevitable future.

  “We’ll come again together. We’ll bring a trowel and dig up the weeds properly.”

  She nods, pulling randomly at some of the creeping dandelion stalks and sweeping the mulch of dead leaves from the base, with the same idleness she used to tidy my bedroom while she was talking to me. Sorry, she’d say when I whined at her to leave my things alone. It’s a mum thing.

  Mud stains her fingers, and she wipes them on her jeans. She peels the plastic wrapper from the pink carnations we bought, shoving it into her pocket, and hands them to me. I bend as best I can to lay them one-by-one in front of the stone.

  “There, that’s better, isn’t it? Pink ones, your favorite. Sorry I haven’t been for a while. I promise to come more often.” She wipes a tear, but her voice is warm and happy. “Jo-Jo’s here. Um, it snowed a couple of days ago. I expect this place was covered. You’d have loved it, Selena, it was so pretty.”

  I take a step away and watch her in admiration. After so long only thinking about myself, this is the way it should always have been—the two of us sharing our pain. There’s a contentment in her I haven’t seen for a long time. Eventually she stands.

  “Do you want … shall I leave you alone for a while? I can sit in the car and wait for you.”

  “Can you hold my hand?”

  We stand in contemplation and reflection. There’s something about the vacuum of the churchyard which gives solace and equanimity. I absorb it, allowing it to flow through me. Memories rise and linger. Good ones, now, only the best. I smile and feel the warmth of small arms around my waist.

  My leg starts to ache, and my arms are stiff with the pressure of the crutches.

  “Nathan needs to go home soon,” I say, watching the sun move lower in the sky. I’ve lost track of time, but the days are still short, and the darkness is always abrupt. “I’ve decided to go with him.”

  She nods. “As you should.”

  “You’re not upset?”

  “I’ll miss you.” She tucks a stray hair into my woolly hat. “But you’ll phone me and visit whenever you want. I’ll come to London. I knew you wouldn’t be staying for good.” She tries to smile, to be jolly and upbeat. “You have a life to get back to, a studio you must be longing to work in again.”

  “I work in my bedroom, it’s hardly something to crave.”

  “Maybe not for long, eh?” She raises her eyebrows and smiles mischievously.

  “You mean …?” I blush. “We haven’t talked about it. He hasn’t said anything. He may not even …”

  “Take your time. You’ve got a lot to work through.”

  “Do you think we can? It feels like it’ll all go wrong as soon as we start analyzing it. I’m not sure I can trust him anymore.”

  “Oh Jo …” She lifts her head and stares at the passing clouds. They move briskly in a wind more tumultuous up there than down on the ground. “Nathan loves you. If you love him, you’ll work it out.”

  “I called him a freak.”

  She stifles a giggle. “I’ve called Craig names. I called your father much worse, even when we were happy.” She checks her watch. “Are you ready? It’ll be dark soon, and you must be freezing.”

  As we make our way along the path, I turn back to Selena’s headstone. The last time I left her behind, a dark shadow fell across the grave—Zenna watching intently, waiting for the cycle to begin ag
ain. Now birds sing from the thick branches of the sycamore tree, and soft pink clouds hint at the beautiful pastel sunset to come.

  I hold on to this moment; I note every detail. Later, when I draw it, perhaps it’ll be the final page.

  Acknowledgements

  I am so excited to see Jo out in the world. She’s been through a lot in the twenty years since she arrived, fully formed, in my head, tugging at my sleeve until I told her story. Along the way, I’ve had the help of my three amazing critique partners—Elizabeth Seckman, Ruth Schiffmann, and Nick Wilford. I’m not sure what I’d do without their unique insights, each of them offering something slightly different to the process, and all of them essential.

  Thanks to Jessica Bell and Amie McCracken, the most supportive and passionate publishers an author could wish for; to Melanie Faith, my editor for this book, for her unwavering excitement for the story, and all her little comments in the margins; and to Peter Snell, the VLP acquisitions guru who saw the potential.

  For readers who know Cornwall well, you might recognize Seaton as being the inspiration for the village and beach which is unnamed in the novel. Over years of walking my dog there and stopping for hot chocolate and buttered teacakes afterwards, the setting took shape. “Research” is a great excuse for doing many things, especially drinking hot chocolate on a sunny winter’s day!

  As always, the biggest shout out goes to my family and my friends, who are always there for me and are well aware that at certain points of a novel I’m going to lose track of a conversation because my characters are talking to me as well.

  This book, and all future books, will be in loving memory of my dad, who—despite not being a big reader of fiction—encouraged me every step of the way.

  About the Author

  Annalisa Crawford lives in Cornwall, UK, with a good supply of moorland and beaches to keep her inspired. She lives with her husband, two sons, and canine writing partner, Artoo. She is the author of four short story collections and two novels.