After Forever Ends

by Melodie Ramone

  I stood there with my mouth gaping, cake and icing up my nose and sticking to my eyelids.

  Oliver was standing in front of me now with his hands on his knees, that old, insane smile on his face, “Are you bored now, Love?”

  “I’m…going to…do…you for that!”

  “Ha! You have to catch me first!” He shouted and made a dash for the door, calling, “You are way too slow, Silvia! You’ll never get me!”

  I grabbed a bread roll from the counter top being as it was the nearest thing I could smash into his face in return and jetted out that door hot on his heels. I couldn’t see for a moment through the cake in my eyes, but I could hear him laughing and shouting from the lawn.

  We were seventeen again. I gave him a good chase across the garden and down the path, but he was still much quicker than I was. “Run! Run as fast as you can! You can’t catch me!” He called as he leaped over something in the way, “I’m the bloody Gingerbread--” It was at that moment his foot caught on something and he fell flat on his chest.

  I had to stop running I was laughing so hard. “Are you hurt?” I called out to him. I kept forward, but I was bent sideways with laughter.

  “I think I’ve ruptured my spleen!” He rolled on to his back and flopped his arms out wide. “I’ve been meaning to fix that hole!”

  It was my turn to cackle and taunt him, “Can’t catch you, you’re the bloody gingerbread man? Did your break your biscuit when you hit the ground?”

  He laid there and laughed.

  I plopped down beside him out of breath, but smiling. “Here,” I handed him the roll, “You must be hungry.”

  He drew me to him and sucked icing off my cheek, “I’d rather eat cake. Oh, that was a good. I should have bought a batch.”

  “It’d have been all out war if you had. And anyway, all you ever eat is the icing.”

  He was quiet. He played with my plait for a while, still smiling, “I love you, Sil.”

  “I love you, too, Oliver.”

  “You know, having them all gone doesn’t have to be a bad thing. We can snog on the couch again in peace.”

  “True.”

  “We can snog all over, in fact. We’ve never done it on the path.”

  “Ha-ha!” I slapped his leg, “Imagine that! On all these stones? I get the top!”

  “Yeah, on second thought, that’s probably not the best idea.” He pulled himself up and helped me to my feet, “I’m starving. Let’s go eat some of your supper, Love. And when we’re done I’ll give you a right good snogging. Test the waters, you know, see if I still got it.”

  “Oh, you still got it,” I assured him.

  We walked back to the house hand in hand.

  After getting cake smashed in my face, Oliver and I were back to our old ways again; pawing each other on the couch, swimming naked in the pond, throwing dirt at each other. We made love on the lawn and slept in the sun when we were through. We stayed up late at night wrapped in that old woollen blanket watching the sky. Oliver kept up his medical practice and I tended the garden. We both went together and talked to the winds and the trees and left sweets for the Lord and the Lady and their boon, of which they now had many more.

  I got used to the cabin being quiet again and fell back into being who I was before the children came along, Just Silvia, Oliver Dickinson’s wife. And, as we always had been, we were happy once more.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Once of the tricks about life is that it’s always changing. Sometimes the changes are good. Sometimes you think they’re good and you end up disappointed. Other times you think life has handed you a lemon and it turns out to be a diamond. And there are other times when it just is what it is. It’s not what you wanted, but there’s nothing you can do about it, so you just have to accept what’s happened and go on. Those are the toughest times in my book, the times when you simply have no choice and life just does what it wants without even asking what anybody thinks.

  There had always been a hole in my heart, a space that my mother had left when she died. Most of my life I’d kept so busy that I didn’t take the time to know it. I recognized that there was a disconnection inside of me when it came to my family. By the time I was a teenager I’d become so engrossed in Oliver and his family and in ingraining myself into it that that I’d left my own blood far behind as if it never mattered. But the truth was that it did matter and as I got older, I began to feel a nagging inside. I was a Scot, born in the Highlands, and living in Wales. I missed my homeland. I began to think more and more about my ancestors, the men and women who had come before me, who had fought and died on the same soil that their father’s had. The same soil under which my mother now rested. The same soil I had left behind.

  Sharon Mariana Nettles. My mother. Born twenty years before me. Married my father. That was all I knew of the woman who had given me life.

  It haunted me more and more that I couldn’t remember her. Sometimes when I was home alone and it was very, very quiet, I’d try. I’d sit with my eyes closed and allow my mind to wander. I had flashes, bits of impressions and snapshot-like memories. Blurbs of a woman standing at the side of a bed with her cool hand pressed against my hot cheek or a woman in a red jacket walking briskly down the street pushing a pram. I could almost hear her, “Come along, Silvia! Faster, Darling! Quit splashing in puddles! Your baby sister can’t get wet like we can!”

  It always left me with a sigh. Was it even her? I couldn’t be sure. No matter what I did, I couldn’t see her face. I knew what she looked like in photos, so I knew I‘d recognize her if I could only just see her.

  I’d talk myself all together out of thinking it was her I remembered. It may not have been. It may have been Gran, whom I did remember. Gran had taken care of Lucy and me so much after Mummy died. The truth was that I would probably never even know. I had only blurry images and ideas, but nothing concrete. I remembered some of the things I did after she was gone. I remember being told that she was with the angels. I didn’t really know what an angel was, so I several times a day I’d go to the window and sit, watching for a car to pull up and have the angels leave her off. I remembered writing a letter and sticking it in the letter box at Gran’s. It was addressed to heaven and I had asked for God to send my mother home. If he couldn’t, I asked for him to give her a drawing that I had enclosed.

  I had no one I could ask about her other than my father. My mother had been an only child. I knew of no cousins on her side, or of any great aunts or uncles who still lived. It was apparent that I was going to have to speak to my father if I wanted to know anything, but I was afraid to do it. The thought of breeching that gap with him, of actually inspiring a response, sent me into convulsions.

  He had never reacted to anything. Not when I did something bad as a child, not when I succeeded in school, not when I ran away and got married under-age or graduated university or had babies. He’d made the required phone calls, shown up for the required visits, given the appropriate congratulations and simply left. But the subject of my mother had been very different. I remembered him after she died. Him, sitting in the living room with his head between his knees, sobbing. I remembered him sinking to his bottom in the grass at the cemetery on a rare visit. I remembered creeping out of my bedroom one night, very late, to find him in the kitchen with a female friend of my mother‘s, a thick glass of brandy in his hand, and I’d asked in a whisper if Mummy was ever coming home.

  He looked at me and made a hard face. His eyes narrowed and he glared. He looked at me as if he hated me, like he’d have slapped my teeth out of my mouth if I had been standing any closer. Then he turned from me and gave the same look to the refrigerator.

  “Get back to your bed!” The friend said harshly, making a move toward me as if she was going to strike me, “Stop talking your nonsense! Leave your father alone!”

  I spun and ran back to my room. I accidentally slammed the door behind me. Lucy, four months old, howled for a moment. I heard my father go to her and the fr
iend mumble something about damning me for my stupidity.

  I hid under the duvet. That was when I understood what dead meant. That was the moment when I knew she was never coming back. That was the moment that the innocent little child that was me ceased to exist. It was the moment that I stopped trusting my dad. I knew to never ask about her again and I never did.

  His response to my question had made it very clear that she was a subject better left untouched. Anything I might have remembered as a child slowly faded from my mind.

  But there were still traces of her. When I was eight I found a woman’s tortoise shell comb in his dresser as I was putting away his pants. He saw it in my hand and froze in the doorway. His face draw back as if he’d been stabbed. The silence that followed left me with a horrible sense of shame as if I’d done something terrible, yet I had no idea exactly what it was.

  And so my mother became a stranger to me, someone who had left me before I had the chance to know her.

  My own children were grown and gone. From time to time they’d phone me, each of them, and we’d chat. The whole time somewhere in the back of my heart there was an ache that hadn‘t been there when they were small. After all those years, after having raised my own children, I finally had time to realise what my mother and I had lost. It was each other. I finally had time to miss her and mourn her passing the way I should have when I was a child.

  Time passed and I still said nothing to my father. It was Oliver who sat with me at night and listened to my frustration, who didn’t call me mad for crying over a woman who’d died so long ago that I couldn’t even remember her.

  “You lost somebody, Sweetie,” He’d say as he smoothed back my hair, “You lost somebody you loved. Maybe it happened a long time ago, but it still happened. In a way, it’s good that you’re finally sad about it. I’m glad that there was enough of a bond there that you can feel that now, all these years later. It’s safe to feel it. You’re safe. It means that she loved you as well…more than you knew…so much that a part of you is still mourning her, yeah?”

  Lucy and I went to visit our father in the spring he was turning seventy. He had rang her and asked us to. He said it was important. Both of us knew that something was occurring, but neither of us knew what. He was waiting in his house for us when we arrived in the afternoon. He looked frail, drawn. He seemed short of breath and had a woman who was flitting about the house. He had never mentioned her to either of us, so, naturally, Lucy asked if he had a girlfriend.

  He laughed softly and shook his head, “No,” He smiled, “Felicity is my nurse.”

  He explained much too calmly that he was in third stage kidney cancer. Lucy and I sat in our chairs in stunned silence as we listened to him prattle on. It was only the one kidney, he told us, and there was no evidence that any cancer had spread. There were plans to have it removed. With luck they’d get it all in one swoop. Without luck, he’d die quickly, possibly even on the table.

  Lucy and I stared at each other. Finally, she spoke, “Daddy! What’s the odds you’ll have luck?”

  He laughed again, oddly happily, “About 10%,” He told her. “Don’t look so frightened, Lucy! It’s certainly dismal, but I’m having it removed, so there’s at least a chance! If I didn’t, I’d be dead in a couple of months. I’m opting for the surgery!” He leaned back in his seat, “I’m a Scot, after all! I won’t go down without a fight!”

  I phoned Oliver later and told him the news, too stunned to feel any emotion. He didn’t have much to offer on the subject. Oncology was not his specialty. We ended up talking about taking a trip to Paris later in the season, just for fun. Just the two of us. He made me laugh like he always did. How odd, I thought. I was fifty-one years old, lying in my old bed in my old bedroom, whispering to Oliver Dickinson on the telephone, covering my mouth so my giggles wouldn’t wake my father. Life truly does repeat itself.

  As we said goodnight, he promised, “I’ll ring you up as soon as I’m done with work. At lunch, maybe, if I can.”

  I thought of the boy who worked at the flour mill in Newtown who always rushed to phone me after work. I wished he were rushing to catch a train instead to see me just like he did then. But I didn’t say it. Instead I sighed, “I love you, Ollie.”

  “I love you, Just Silvia. I’m glad you’re not hurt or ticked off.”

  “No, Sweetie,” I laughed softly, “I’m just fine.”

  Lucy and I stayed in Edinburgh, in the house we’d grown up in, while Daddy prepared for his operation. The day he had it we were at the hospital. It took several hours. Lucy cried here and there, paced the halls, phoned Alexander so often I thought he’d tell her to stop, but he never did. I didn’t feel quite so anxious. I sat on the couch in the waiting room and drank coffee from a paper cup while I read a book. On the surface I am sure that I appeared removed, but the truth was that I felt far from it. I wanted that man to live. Not so much because I loved him so much I couldn’t imagine life without him or because, like my sister, I valued life in general so highly. I wanted him to live because I still hadn’t gotten what I wanted out of him yet. He still hadn’t told me about Mum.

  The doctor came out of the operating room at about six in the morning to tell us that Dad had come through his surgery successfully. “We got the kidney,” He said with a tired smile, “And it looks like we got all the cancer with it. It’s going to be a rough road, but this part is over.”

  Lucy and I were exhausted. We took a taxi back to the house. It was still inside as we entered, like there was no life in there at all. It smelled faintly like pine needles and coffee. The boards creaked beneath my feet as I walked into the kitchen.

  Lucy followed behind me. She stretched her arms over her head and yawned loudly. She shifted her weight from side to side, “Well, I reckon we should go to sleep.”

  An idea had suddenly swept me. I turned to her and put my hands on my hips, more awake than I’d been all night. “You go ahead, Lucy,” I told her, “I’m going to go into the attic.”

  “For what?” She made a face. Her nose twisted and her bottom lip poked out just a bit. Lucy had always been afraid of the attic.

  “You don’t have to come,” I laughed, “But I want to have a look. There have to be… things there…” I trailed off, then said the rest quickly, “That I want to see.”

  “Like what?” She blinked, looking at me as if I were out of my skull.

  “Oh, Lucy!” I stomped my foot, “Things that were Mummy’s! You know he’s hidden them! I want to see!”

  “Mum’s?” She looked confused.

  “Lu, I know you were little and you don’t remember her, but I do! I think I do! I might! I think about her all the time lately and I wonder. I think I remember things, but I’m not sure and if I can find something…anything…that was hers maybe I’ll be able to remember more.”

  My little sister nodded with sudden understanding, “All right,” She answered gently, “Do you want company?”

  “That’s up to you. You’re tired, aren’t you?”

  She grinned. Lucy was forty-six years old, but she was still beautiful, especially when she smiled. “Nothing coffee can’t fix!” She swore as she glanced at the machine on the counter, “You taught me that!”

  My sister and I tore through that attic and searched for any remnants of our mother.

  “I feel naughty,” She told me as she flipped open a dusty hat box, “Like I’m not supposed to be doing this.”

  “He wouldn’t like it,” I agreed, “But I don’t really care. She belongs to us, too, LuLu,” I felt a ping of anger spread through my chest and run up my neck. Heat spread across my face, “She belongs to us as well. He can’t keep her to himself anymore. It’s not fair.”

  Lucy nodded and began to thumb through the contents of the box. After several minutes, she paused, “Oh, my,” She said softly, running her fingers gently over a post card, “Have a look.”

  She handed it to me. It was a glossy black post card with a picture of red wine and
the words, “Je t’aime.” I flipped it over and read what was written on the back.

  “Dear Philip, Paris is no good without you. I miss you. Hurry. Love forever, Sharon.” I checked the post date. They were eighteen years old.

  My father had told me once that they’d lived in Paris briefly after they were married. I read the words again, “Look at the date. It was right after they were married.”

  Lucy took the card from my hand, read it and grinned, “Let’s see what else we can find.”

  There wasn’t much else. Some old photos, many reminders of our childhoods, some of Gran’s gloves and hats, but not much of our mother. Not much at all.

  Daddy came home a week later. Oliver and Alexander came on the weekends to help out. After two more weeks Daddy told us he was fine with his nurses and more or less tossed us out. Relieved, we returned to our lives and our husbands.

  “Did you ask him about your mother?” Oliver asked me.

  “No, I didn’t want to upset him, especially considering what he’d been through.”

  Ollie didn’t ask anything else.

  I put the post card I had stolen from him in a glass frame and I hung it in our bedroom on the wall beside photos of our children when they were little.

  A year passed. I spoke to Dad maybe three or four times, but I asked him nothing. Lucy came to the wood one day all alone. Her eyes were wet and swollen. “I just spoke to a doctor, Sil,” Her bottom lip quivered, “He was at a football game and he collapsed.”

  “Dad?” I felt my heart stop, “Is he all right?"

  “Oh, Sil! He’s all right! Sort of! He’s home, but the cancer’s back!” She wailed, “It’s in his lungs this time! Stage three again! Oh, Sil…it’s bad! It‘s so bad! We have to go!”

  The two of us drove again to Edinburgh. With no time to wait, he was in surgery when we arrived. Half of one lung was coming out and a quarter of another, plus he was going to have to undergo chemotherapy and radiation. Oliver and Alexander followed after the next evening, both of them uncharacteristically quiet, even as the four of us sat in Daddy‘s kitchen and played cards to pass the time while we waited for word from the hospital.