Page 108 of People In Love
This is what Nora had asked him, thereabouts, when he’d left her engagement party. And this provokes something in him. Déjà vu; a slow, upward swell of emotion. So much has happened in so short a time, he thinks. When for twelve years, he’s scaled mountains and crossed ravines and skimmed atop the darkest, deepest waters, so he could avoid the real landscape of his life.
I guess I’ve got time for a coffee, he says.
And Josie beams with delight.
_
They take their coffees to the bottom of the garden. His mother has pulled two plastic chairs under the shade of the oak, and there is dew on the grass. Misty morning. Feels like summer; she says this; he agrees.
They sit, the steam rising off their cups.
I’ll come home more often, he says to her. For Christmas, and stuff.
You don’t have to, darling.
I know I don’t.
Both of them, he thinks, reflecting on all the holidays he’s missed. All the birthdays. His thirtieth. Her sixtieth. All the phone calls cut short, because there was nothing to say; when in fact there is so much to say, he can feel it like the earth under his feet, the ash he’d let sift through his hands. He thinks of New Zealand and how clean the air is there. How much there is to do and see, how distracted and entertainedand exhausted he is, so much of the time, and then his mother says I love you, you know, and he looks up.
It’s not that she doesn’t say it. She says it often, at the end of phone calls, love you, by way of goodbye. But this feels different. Intentional.
Not just because you’re my son, she says. And not just because I see your father in you, which I do.
Bren waits for the flare in his blood, at this, but it remains calm, like the river.
I love you because you saw me at my worst, Josie says. And I know that must have been terrible, growing up, Bren. I know you had to learn to care for yourself, too young. Or to rely on your dad instead of me. But despite that, and I know I’ve said it before, you knew I didn’t need to be babied. You knew you could go and live your life, and leave me to live mine. And that fills me with strength, Bren, that has sustained me, more than anything, since he died.
They can hear the starlings from back here.
Scrabbling, still, in the gutter.
It brings me peace, in fact, his mother goes on, knowing that you’re not hovering over me, but doing what makes you happy.
Bren looks past his mother, now, to the branches of the tree curving low over the roof of the garden shed. He thinks about how he and Nora used to jump off at this lowest point, career back to the house for snacks or else force their way through the gap in the hedge to get to the river behind. They swam in it, a few times, against Josie’s wishes; Freya encouraged it; Jon pretended not to know.
I’m not sure I am happy, he says, and Josie’s face drops, so he hastens to say it’s all right. Really. Because surely knowing that, means he can try and do something about it.
He looks down at the soil packed hard around the roots.His father there, now. A part of the world, down here, which is the same as the world out there, really, wherever he goes. It’s all the same land, the same air.
I want to find someone, he says. Someone I can let in, or … open myself up to, I guess.
Someone that’s not Nora? Josie asks, and he looks at her, then, lets out a breath that’s part-laugh.
I don’t know that I even let her in, half the time, he says. I think that’s the problem, Mum. Even the person I’m closest to has always felt … far away.
And it is not what he’s admitted, but what he’s called her in that admission, which is not lost on either of them. Mum. There is a moment where they feel that, like the dew damp on their shoes, and then Josie says she’s getting married today, Bren.
He doesn’t quite understand.
She called Freya, first thing, she says. Who called me.
Bren tries to keep still. Fights the urge to stand, or to run.
You two, he says, in the end. You really share everything, don’t you?
And Josie smiles. Says oh, you have no idea.
Bren pours his coffee dregs onto the grass. Wants to leave, now. Thinks of Nora, and this thing he is not a part of – how she is bungee jumping, like he’d told her to – how he doesn’t get to care. But he does. And that caring, in itself, is not losing. Not a failure, like he’d always thought.
