Chapter Forty-Two
FORTY-TWO
Louisa and Ted are sitting on the rocks wrapped in towels, shivering in the sunrise.
“Is it always that cold in the sea?” she wonders.
“No. Sometimes it’s much colder,” he smiles.
“I’ve never felt like this, my skin feels different…”
“There’s nothing like the sea. Now your skin knows that. Now it’s going to miss it, always,” he promises.
Louisa sways from side to side, between euphoria and melancholy.
“I would have liked to tell Fish about this. Sometimes I’m so… angry. She never got to see the sea.”
Ted cleans his glasses for a long time.
“She saw the sea every night with you, on the postcard. And she’s seeing the sea now,” he says.
“Thanks,” Louisa mumbles.
“I should thank you.”
“No, I mean, thanks for teaching me to swim…,” she says.
“No, really. I haven’t been swimming in the sea in twenty-five years. So I’m the one who should be thanking you. Besides, it was much easier to teach you than Ali…”
She smiles. He does too.
“I’m sorry we lost the ashes,” she says sadly.
“I’m the one who lost them,” he corrects her.
“Okay. I’m sorry you lost them, then,” she says quietly.
“Well, it was a little your fault too!” he retorts.
She has just enough time to feel very badly insulted before she realizes that he’s joking.
“Very funny,” she mutters.
“I thought so,” he grins.
She looks at the box containing the painting between them on the rocks.
“Do you think he would have been angry? About us losing him?” she asks.
“No. I think he would have laughed. He liked hide-and-seek.”
Her eyes light up.
“Maybe it isn’t such a bad idea to get your ashes scattered on a train, after all? That way you’re always on your way somewhere!”
Ted looks absolutely horrified.
“Ugh, don’t say that. Can’t we even stop having to travel when we’re dead ?”
Louisa laughs.
“Where do you want your ashes scattered, then?”
Ted thinks for a good while before deciding:
“In a library. You don’t have to put up with reality there. It’s as if thousands of strangers have given away their imaginary friends, they’re sitting on the shelves and calling to you as you walk past. There’s an author called Donna Tartt who describes why a person falls in love with art: ‘It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you.’ That’s what libraries feel like for me.”
Louisa has to pretend to have sea water in her eyes at that.
“How many damn books have you actually read?”
“Not nearly enough.”
Louisa disguises a sob with a cough.
“Fish liked libraries too.”
Then she takes Fish’s cigarettes from her backpack, because Fish always said she had heard that a cigarette after a swim is the best one of all. Louisa doesn’t light it, she just smells the tobacco, and to her surprise Ted gently reaches out his fingers and asks:
“Can I borrow one?”
Louisa wrinkles her whole face in surprise.
“Seriously?”
“Not to smoke, just to… smell. My mom used to smoke that brand.”
She hands him one. So they sit by the sea with the painting, each with a cigarette under their nose, a mild breeze in their hair, and the first light of morning on their cheeks.
“Are you like her? Your mom?” Louisa asks cautiously.
“Yes, I think so.”
“Was she very kind?”
Ted’s laughter echoes off the rocks. He shakes his head.
“No… no… I don’t think ‘kind’ is a word anyone would have used about her. She was a hard woman when I was a child, very hard, Joar once said she could headbutt a diamond and break it.”
“Hard in what way?”
Ted looks sadly at the cigarette.
“Mom had very definite ideas about… everything. She didn’t want my brother and I to show our feelings, not whine, never cry. It was important to her that we always behaved like… men.”
“So she isn’t like you at all,” Louisa exclaims angrily.
Ted rolls the cigarette back and forth between his fingers, taking deep breaths of the smell of tobacco and salt and a summer that’s on its way.
“It’s incredibly difficult being a mom, Louisa. It’s difficult being a human being. I think my mom was very like me at first, because she was a romantic when she was young. But there’s no harder person on the planet than a romantic with a broken heart.”
“Did she hit you?”
“No.”
“But you got hit?”
“Yes, dear God, yes. My big brother hit me every day when we were little. One time he threw me down some stairs and I got knocked unconscious. It took me a long time to even remember that, I thought I had slipped…”
“Were you scared of him?”
“Yes. It’s hard to be little.”
“It’s hard to be everything.”
“Yes. That’s true. It’s hard to be everything.”
Shivering, Louisa pulls the towel more tightly around herself and asks:
“What’s your best memory of your mom?”
Ted smells the cigarette. The memories are slippery, hard for his brain to get a grip on.
“Of Mom? Us… playing cards.”
“Cards?”
“Yes. She used to work nights so she could look after Dad during the day. I was bad at school, I had trouble with language, trouble reading and writing. One teacher told Mom that I was being bullied, and I wished he hadn’t, because I could see Mom thinking it was her fault. That evening I heard her on the phone to a friend, telling her that she couldn’t bear being at home with nothing but death for company. The next day she woke me with her hand on my forehead and whispered: ‘You’ve probably got a fever.’ I can’t remember her ever actually touching me before then. It was like… the sun. As if she had been possessed by an overfriendly demon. And that whole day we played cards at the kitchen table. It sounds stupid, but that’s my best memory, because then she just felt like my mom. That first day she pretended I was ill, the next I pretended on my own, and then I went on pretending for several months. We hid away from reality, both of us, it was… wonderful. But after a while Dad got worse and had to spend more time in the hospital, and Mom kept going back and forth, and it was too much work for her to have me at home then. In the end the school called and said I’d have to retake the whole year if I didn’t go back, so one day when I woke up Mom had already packed my backpack. When I got back to school I was like an animal that had grown up in a zoo, only to suddenly be released out into the wild. I got teased more than ever, I got beaten up a lot and went home battered and bruised… and I remember how disappointed Mom looked then. I was ashamed that I kept causing problems, so I said I’d fallen. She knew I was lying, but just asked if I was hungry. That evening I heard her talking on the phone, I could hear the sob in her voice as she told her friend that it was probably her fault that I was so weak. That I wasn’t anything like my brother, who could fight and defend himself. Mom said she must have spoiled me, made me soft. She said she was… worried. That I would never be a… real man.”
Ted falls silent. Louisa looks away so he can wipe his eyes in peace.
“When did your mom’s heart break? When your dad got sick?” she asks.
He considers his answer for a long time.
“Yes. But perhaps it didn’t break. Maybe it got worn out. We didn’t have much money when Dad got sick, we only had just enough to keep the house, she probably always felt like she wasn’t enough. She worked in a factory, was always tired. The sound I remember most from my childhood is being hushed, because either my mom or my dad was asleep, or both of them. That’s why I got the room in the basement, so I wouldn’t be in the way.”
“Are you sure about that?” Louisa asks.
Ted raises his eyebrows, somewhere in the borderland between surprised and insulted.
“How do you mean?”
Louisa’s shoulders bounce.
“I just mean… maybe you got the room in the basement so you wouldn’t see how sick your dad was the whole time? And how sad your mom was? And maybe your mom was trying to protect you from your big brother?”
Ted stares out across the sea, squinting at the sun with shame washing through him. All these years and he has never even considered that. It’s hard to be little, hard to be big, hard to be everything in between. So he turns toward Louisa and says:
“It wasn’t only bad. It was a love story at first, my mom and dad’s marriage…”
Then her eyes grow wide in anticipation, because she loves love stories. So he tells it to her the way it was once told to him.