Chapter 51
Violet
He had seen me kiss Juan, and he had run. Straight into the path of a car, travelling too fast around bends shrouded in darkness. The wing mirror had picked him up by the sleeve of his overalls and tossed him down on to the road, dragging him several metres until the driver – a bewildered Spanish woman in her eighties – applied the brakes. A few seconds was all it had taken to destroy one side of his face, an accident born of a choice that I had made, to betray my husband in the worst possible way.
I didn’t blame Henry for hating me. I deserved every ounce of it. And yet, I did want the chance to explain why I’d done it. I believed I was worth that much at least. He had refused to listen in the hospital, when his head was swaddled in bandages, eventually sending me a text message that simply read: It’s over. Go home.
Now, I knew, I shouldn’t have allowed myself to be persuaded. I’d ventured down the wrong path with Henry not once, but twice, and I wasn’t about to clock up a third.
Taking a deep breath, I made myself face him. We were still sitting on the patio, the same place I had danced with Juan that night, the bubble of happiness around me so flimsy as to be barely there at all. I had been trying to gather up the burst pieces of it ever since.
‘It wasn’t planned,’ I said. ‘What happened that night – none of it was premeditated.’
Henry’s mouth was a hard line. ‘Tell me.’
‘You’d been out all day, Luke was shut up in his room as always, and I was bored, I guess. Feeling sorry for myself. I’d had a few drinks by the time Juan showed up.’
‘You didn’t invite him?’
‘No.’ I shook my head, half laughing at the ludicrousness of it all, of how much trouble had been wrought by a man deciding to call on a neighbour. ‘He actually came looking for you, wanted to talk to you about your father, about some business deal. I can’t remember the details. Like I said, I’d been drinking.’
‘And?’
‘And...’ I exhaled sharply. ‘I invited him in. We got to talking, you know, about life, Ana, us, the accident with Luke, how it had changed everything.’
Henry’s gaze remained steady.
‘I told him I was unhappy,’ I said, punctuating the statement with a sad sort of laugh. I’d believed it when I’d said as much to Juan, but of course, the joke was on me. I’d known nothing of real misery until after that night.
‘Why?’
It was a simple enough question, but I struggled to formulate a reply. The situation was both complicated and precarious, as it had been then, and I considered what to say before I responded. The truth, in the end, was my safest bet.
‘Because I was unhappy, Henry, for so many reasons, and Juan cared. Nobody else ever asked if I was all right – not you, not Luke, not my mum. The only people who ever seemed to notice how sad I was were Ynes and Juan. I used to look forward to coming over here to the island partly because I knew there were friends here that genuinely cared about me, who saw me as Violet, a woman, a human being with emotions and limits. At home in England, I was just Mum. That’s all I ever was.’
‘You didn’t kiss Ynes, though, did you?’ Henry pointed out.
‘No.’
‘So, why kiss Juan?’
‘It was a stupid lapse of judgement.’
‘You’re going to have to do better than that.’
‘It didn’t mean anything.’
‘To you, maybe. To me, it meant everything.’
I wrung my hands together in my lap, rubbing at the skin around my knuckles, the shape of them so like the undulating Pollen?a hills. Luke had told me once that drawing a person’s hands was more difficult than capturing a likeness of their face.
‘We carry our histories in our hands, Mum. Every story we’ve had a role in can be told through them; they are the part we spend the most time examining and the one most familiar to us – more so than our features. We get to see our hands, but we can never see a true likeness of our faces, not through our own eyes.’
Luke had shown Henry and me how he saw us, the painting he’d done as clear a rendering as we were likely to get of how we appeared to the world.
‘Is it the kiss you can’t forgive?’ I asked. ‘Or the fact it was Juan I did it with?’
Henry flinched as though I’d drilled down and found a nerve.
‘Anyone else,’ he said. ‘Anyone but him, I might have been able to, not overlook, but get my head around. But him? My supposed friend. The man who Luke had hero-worshipped for half his life, who you’d bloody well hero-worshipped ever since that day on the stupid boat. No matter what I did after that day, how much I bent to Luke’s will and gave into his every whim, it couldn’t make up for the fact that Juan excelled at all the things I was useless at. He saved my son’s life when I couldn’t, for god’s sake. That’s why, Vee. That’s why it hurt me so much when I saw him doing the one thing that I thought I could still beat him at – making you happy, being the one who made you smile, and laugh and dance. Jesus!’ he cried, throwing up his hands then getting to his feet. I watched him pace the length of the patio with his head down and waited for his agitation to subside.
‘I wanted you to be that person,’ I said, quietly so he had no choice but to come back and sit beside me. ‘I kept waiting for him to reappear, but he never did.’
He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘I was there.’
‘You treated me differently after Luke. The older he got, the more issues that came to light, the further away you pushed me. That’s how it felt, Henry,’ I said, as he continued to dismiss what I was saying. ‘I wasn’t even Violet to you any more, I was Mum. Juan wasn’t like that – and it was nice to feel seen. He saw as me, Henry. Me.’
I expected him to scoff, to tell me I was self-obsessed, that being a parent took priority over everything else – even my sense of identity. It was nothing I hadn’t already told myself a thousand times, during a thousand periods of self-slander, and while being a mother meant a lot to me, it was not my sole purpose for existing. I had more to offer, and I wanted Henry to see it, for him to remember who I was.
My hands were still playing an invisible tug of war, and Henry stilled me by putting one of his own over mine. He was completely calm again – almost serene.
‘Vee, listen to me.’
I listened.
‘I do see you as you,’ he said. ‘I see that one frown line that shows up whenever you’re reading the list of ingredients on the back of a packet—’
‘The print is so small—’
‘And I see that smile you get when you think nobody is watching, when the sun comes through the trees and turns everything to gold; I see the bitten-down nail of your third finger, the ring you still wear on it, that hope you’ve never let go of.’
I blinked then, tears threatening.
‘I love the way you sing along to radio jingles as if they’re another verse of a song, how you’ll try to save even the smallest, most shrivelled up of plants. I love that you made me listen when you were worried about my dad, even when I wasn’t ready to hear you, and I love how brave you’ve been with Luke, how many times you stuck up for him, made calls and refused to be fobbed off by those wet blankets at the mental health clinic. If it’d been me, I’d have given up, but you never did, and—’
‘Love,’ I said, stopping him mid-flow. ‘You said love.’
‘I know. So?’
I fixed him with a look that could never hope to articulate what I was feeling. There were too many emotions at play, a soup of regret, and sorrow, and adoration.
‘Love, Henry,’ I whispered. ‘Not loved – present tense, not past.’
He started to reply, his words disintegrating as the meaning of my own took root.
‘You told me you didn’t love me any more,’ I said.
Even now, almost two years after he’d done exactly that, it pained me to repeat it. To give it air was to risk reminding him of how he’d felt then, how he might still feel – but I had to know.
Henry didn’t say anything, he merely stared at me; perplexity in his expression as he shook his head. There was no way of knowing if he was doing so to dismiss me, or his past self, and the hope – always present, forever a thorn in my side – caused me to shrink in on myself.
‘Sorry is all I am,’ I told him. ‘It’s the only thing I have left to give.’
That and love.
Henry looked on the verge of saying something when a clattering sound heralded the return of Eliza, who was stacking her and Luke’s empty glasses in the kitchen sink.
‘Luke’s gelling his hair,’ she explained, seeing me peering in through the open back door. ‘And Juan’s waiting out front.’
I felt myself flush. ‘Juan’s here?’
Henry took his hand from mine. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, sounding less amenable than he had a few moments ago, and stomped off into the house. Unsure what else to do, I followed him, reaching the bottom of the stairs at the same time as Luke descended.
‘Hey,’ he said, then, as Henry opened the front door, ‘Oh, hi, Juan.’
‘What are you doing here?’ I blurted rudely. Juan, unsurprisingly, pulled a ‘what have I done now?’ face.
‘The Rosario began forty minutes ago,’ he said. ‘I thought you had forgotten.’
‘Crap, I haven’t got my phone,’ said Luke, and trudged back upstairs.
Juan was already backing out of the hallway, his attention switching from me to Henry. He could sense that something was going on, that he’d walked into the middle of a discussion, and was clearly trying his best to avoid confrontation.
‘I will wait outside,’ he said. ‘Paulina, she wanted to come with her abuelo, but then she remembered about...’ He trailed off, eyes flickering across the scarred side of Henry’s face. ‘She was too scared to come inside. I am sorry,’ he added nonchalantly, registering our stony glares, ‘but this is children. If they’re not being noisy, they are likely to be misbehaving. You have to watch them like an owl, with a pair of eyes in the back of your head.’
‘Got it,’ Luke reappeared, shoving his phone into his trouser pocket. ‘Shall we go?’
‘In a minute,’ said Henry. He was looking at Juan, his expression unreadable.
Eliza strolled through from the kitchen, a roll of toilet paper in her hand.
‘Thought we might need this,’ she said. ‘You know, in case we start crying.’
If I cried any more during this trip, I’d need to be placed overnight in a bowl of water to replenish myself like a peace lily.
We trooped outside, to where the midday heat hung damp like a curtain and found the front garden deserted.
‘Paulina,’ said Juan, with an urgency that sent a chill right through me. ‘She is gone.’