Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

29. 1968

1968

I don’t bring up Bobby’s photograph with Leo because the truth is, I feel responsible. He’s a boy who misses his mother and I’ve managed to make it worse by showing him how much I miss my son. Or that’s my reading of it, anyway.

I’ve been a little selfish, I think, telling Leo about Bobby, just because it was a way of helping me to keep his memory fresh. Trouble is, no one lets me talk about him. Frank can’t often bear it because he’s so steeped in guilt he manages to carry on only by acting as if Bobby never existed. I worry for Frank. Where will it end, all this unresolved grief that has no place to go? His way of coping is to work himself into the ground so that he falls into an exhausted sleep each night, ready to start over again at sunrise. Jimmy is the same, although he also relies on booze to get him through tough times. But at least he’s got Nina and the prospect of their wedding to look forward to and, I hope, a baby of their own soon enough.

I’m about to go home when Gabriel comes into the kitchen. He’s been working all afternoon and I haven’t yet seen him since the incident with the photo.

“We should talk, don’t you think?” he says. “Stay for a glass of wine?” He glances at Leo, doing his homework at the kitchen table. “We could have it in the library?”

It seems more like a command than an invitation and I feel a sudden, stabbing anxiety as I follow him along the corridor. Perhaps he’ll ask me to stop looking after Leo. It’s not what I want, but it would probably be the best thing for us all.

This room, this beautiful, book-lined room. We once spent a week here, curled together on the sofa as we worked our way through novels with thin, yellowing pages and fancy typography, pausing to read out sentences to one another if they were funny or particularly good.

On the coffee table in front of the sofa, a bottle of white wine is waiting, with two glasses.

“Presumptuous,” I say, and Gabriel laughs.

“I could probably manage it on my own if I had to.”

The wine is delicious, as I’d known it would be.

“From the cellar?” I ask after my first taste.

He nods. “More down there than I’ll ever drink on my own. Some of it has probably turned to vinegar.”

In the beat of silence that follows I am wondering if I can distract him with small talk, but my mind is ridged with worry and I cannot find anything to say.

“I need to talk to you about Leo,” Gabriel says, at last. “But I don’t want to upset you.”

I return my wine to the table, sit bolt upright as if I’m being interviewed or, more likely, sacked. “If this isn’t working out, I completely understand. There are plenty of people who’d watch Leo after school for you. I could put word around—?”

I see the surprise come into Gabriel’s face as he registers what I have said. “No, no, that’s the last thing I want. Leo is not a very happy boy; we both know that. He hates school. The only thing he looks forward to is the afternoons with you. Look, this is difficult—”

“Just say it, Gabriel.”

“You talk to Leo about Bobby quite a bit, don’t you?”

“I suppose I do,” I say, as casually as I can.

“And I think Leo has become a bit obsessed with Bobby. I know that must sound very strange to you. I think Leo sees Bobby as this perfect child he can never live up to. It’s because of the divorce, it’s messed with his head. Leo misses his mother, he feels displaced here, and suddenly you’ve come along with this golden boy who died—”

I won’t allow myself to cry but I clench my fists together, breathe out one long, shaky exhalation.

“Oh, God.” Gabriel looks stricken. “I knew this would hurt you. I’m sorry.”

I’m nodding at him, nodding and nodding. “I knew I shouldn’t talk about Bobby so much. But Leo was curious about him, he kept asking questions. And no one else asks me about him, ever. It’s like Bobby is a ghost everyone has forgotten. And I miss him. I miss him so much. I loved telling Leo about him. Once I started, I just couldn’t stop.”

“I wish I’d known him,” Gabriel says, quietly.

The pain of that. There is nothing I can say. My whole life moving forward will be filled with people who never knew my son.

“What was he like?”

“I’m trying my best to stop talking about him, Gabriel.” I’m laughing now, calm again.

“But not to me. I’d like to know what sort of boy Bobby was. From the little you’ve said, he sounds wonderful.”

“Really?”

My traitorous heart, always racing.

“Really. Tell me everything.”

This is how our friendship begins to change. Slowly, at first, so that I hardly register it. The early evening wine drinking. An hour when I talk about my dead son and Gabriel listens as if I am telling him a story, night after night, while I draw Bobby’s character from scratch. And perhaps I am. Where to start, describing the boy he was to a man who will never meet him? With his birth, of course, the day when a violent storm ripped down trees and telephone poles and blocked the road to our farm. A day when a teenage schoolboy delivered his nephew onto the kitchen floor. Pause after the recounting, take the time to taste again the euphoria of that day, when everything was ahead.

When I walk home, I am alive to the memories, the sweet, sweet years, all nine of them, when Bobby was here. I feel excited thinking of stories to tell Gabriel the next day. And frightened when I think how much it would hurt Frank if he knew I was sharing intimacies about our treasured only son.