Chapter 19 #3
I wanted to intervene weeks ago, she says, when you told Freya what you’d seen.
That you’d been carrying that, all these years!
Oh, Nora, we wanted to sit you down right then, but you were so determined to stay away from her – and I didn’t know how I’d broach it, alone, with Bren in the house.
This isn’t something he could stomach, I don’t think.
Not with everything else still so – raw, for him.
No, Nora says.
Maybe I’ll tell him someday, Josie muses. When he’s more settled, or made his peace with his past. Though I have wondered, over the last few weeks, if you’d told him yourself.
But Nora shakes her head.
Never. I was so … ashamed, she says, and her voice sounds strange to her own ears; muffled, like she’s underwater.
I didn’t know what to do. And I was so sure that something like that would make things worse for you, Josie, and I knew you were – she is going to say fragile, or unstable, but she knows it is wrong to say such things, so instead she says I didn’t want to break your heart.
Or Bren’s. And I was trying to figure out what to do, confront Freya, or him, and then soon after I saw them together, like that, he died.
Josie looks bereft.
I never raised it with Freya because I just wanted to forget it. The whole thing. But I was so angry with them, Nora whispers, and he died, like that, with me angry at him –
And her voice catches, and splits. The full revelation crashing over her, like a wave.
I’ve been so angry with him, Nora says, for so long. I sat through his funeral and thought about karma and couldn’t say a nice word about him, and I was glad, in a way, that Bren was gone, because I couldn’t face him, I – I didn’t know how to be around him, with this huge, awful thing –
And there are not tears, now, just dry sobs through the shock of it as Josie reaches over and takes both her hands and does not say another word. Just squeezes Nora’s palms in her own. So tiny, but with such assuredness. Such control Nora had never conceived of.
They hold hands across the table, like that; as the wave settles, retreats.
And when Josie lets go, it is like Nora can breathe again.
Like she can float, if not quite swim; just lie back, and look at the vast open sky.
Josie somehow pours more tea, they somehow finish their cake, and then they talk because Nora has questions, and Josie, it seems, wants to provide answers.
She talks with a fervour Nora has only seen in her when she’s talking about koala bears or seabirds or the settings on her bread machine.
About the past, their shared barbecues, Christmas dinner, Easter weekend.
Jon’s love of bobble hats and Guinness and gravy, and his laugh, so hoarse when it first came on, he sounded like Muttley the dog; Josie asks who; Nora shows her a clip from Wacky Races on her phone; none of this is normal, Nora muses, and yet when did life ever promise normality; when did she ever want that, even, or expect it, being raised by a woman like Freya.
She feels calmer as the hours wear on.
On the wall, clear evening light, like water. Like she could drink it down.
She could have tried harder to tell me, Nora says, when they have drained the teapot. Freya, I mean. These last few weeks.
I’m not sure she really wanted to, Josie says.
Think of it from her side. All those years of strong, independent womanhood.
Warning you against weddings and rom-coms, banning you from watching Disney, and then she went and fell in love with a man, in spite of herself.
Or at least, she thinks she did. And pride is a prickly thing, pet.
For all of us. Her softer side is not one she is used to sharing.
Nora nods. Knowing, too, that on some level, if Freya had told her – broken down her door, forced her to listen – she wouldn’t have believed her, anyway. It had to be like this; had to come from Josie.
And, she asks her, you really won’t tell Bren?
For the same reason you didn’t, Josie says. I’d hoped to find a quiet moment to tell you all this, without him, and Nora nods; understands.
But something is sticking to her, like a burr. What do you mean, she says, Freya only thinks she was in love with Jon?
Josie, who was reaching for Nora’s teacup, shrugs with one slender shoulder. Like Bren. Because she wasn’t, she says.
How do you –
I just know, she says, and for the first time, there is an edge to her voice, but maybe Nora imagined it, because she is as softly spoken as ever when she goes on.
Now, I’m hardly going to correct her on that, pet.
She was devastated when he died. Shocked at herself, I think, by how attached she’d become. But Jon and I?
Josie looks towards the urn, as if he’s sitting in his armchair, listening.
We were partners. We said vows. We shared a bed, we had a child, we stuck by each other in my sickness and his health and made it work, because we talked, and adapted, made it through what might have seemed, to so many, like dead ends.
I know I’m not the brightest button, Nora.
I’m not smart or savvy or brave. But I am wise when it comes to this.
Being married to someone is something I understand.
It’s sharing the good and the bad, your innermost doubts, as well as your certainties. It’s not just lust, or passion.
That last word seems deliberate. Lands, like the first flake of snow.
It’s microwaving a curry when one of you is too tired to cook, Josie says, her voice earnest. It’s folding their underpants, or doing the shopping, getting their favourite pasta sauce, even if you don’t like it.
It’s stacking the dishwasher together at night, and emptying it in the morning.
It’s being bored by, and besotted with, the person you chose.
And it is a choice, Nora, not just a feeling.
It’s hundreds of tiny choices that say yes, we are in something, together.
Even when it’s hard, or unglamorous. But, my god, it’s yours. Ours.
Nora looks at Josie across the table.
Her mother’s best friend. Her best friend’s mother.
I didn’t want to tell you all this just so you’ll forgive Freya and Jon, Josie says.
But so you can see that your own life should be shared with the one you are most yourself with, Nora.
The one you can talk to about uncomfortable things.
The one who stands by you. Who doesn’t question who you are, or the tiny choices you make.
Nora holds herself completely still, at these words.
Says she knows.
But do you? Josie says. Because I’ve watched you wavering, these past few months – and she sounds sheepish, like she doesn’t want to overstep, but really, Nora thinks, there are no lines left to cross between them.
Not sending out wedding invites? Not buying a dress, Bren said? Rethinking what it is that you want?
Thud of Nora’s heart, in time with the grandfather clock.
Ideas of what you want, though, Josie goes on, are often just that. Ideas. Notions. Freya thinks she fell in love with my Jon. But sharing a life with someone, Nora; that’s what’s real. Do you see?
And Nora does. Did, already. To prove it, she takes her phone from the table, opens up what she has not yet shown to anyone and hands it over.
And Josie looks down and frowns, and for a moment Nora worries she’s got this all wrong, that in fact Josie was pleading with her to choose her son, but then she looks up and smiles, and it is steady and relieved and understanding.
Because this woman, Nora knows now, understands more than she’d ever given her credit for.
Oh, Nora, she says.
And Nora is going to respond but then there is the sound of a key in a lock, and Bren is calling out to his mother and the smell of recent rain is flooding in, fresh, from the open front door.
_
Mum, he calls, from the hallway, which is a name he has not said out loud for at least twelve years.
His black shirt is soaked through. The shower came on suddenly, would’ve left him cold if he’d not been walking so fast, and then the downpour cleared and the sunset was luminous, blasting away all the dark.
Which is what often happens, after a storm abroad.
Everything shifting so suddenly, you get a glimpse of something through the weather you’d thought had set in.
But you don’t decide these things, he thought, as he walked around in the lifting rain.
You are who you are, you can’t change that, just like you can’t control bad weather.
But then, he figured, as the sun set, that doesn’t mean the view is not there, behind the cloud – something to see, or to reach for.
And what if he wanted to be someone who reached for the good things, instead of running from the bad?
What if he could decide to do things another way?
What if he jumped?
Home, then, his wet shoes on the carpet as he calls her name; as he hears his mother rise from her chair.
Making her way to the hall, where he is standing beside the photograph of his father that she never took down.
And why would she, when feeling – remembering – is a part of keeping him close; means, he’s realised, you don’t have to let go.
Josie stops, like the rain, when she sees him.
She looks worn out, and Bren is cold now he’s stopped moving but also burning with resolve, and he can’t take another moment to peer over the edge and he is sweating and breathless and then he sees Nora, too, with her wide eyes and flushed cheeks and something softer about her jaw.
His mother goes to speak, but he gets there first.
Why didn’t you do it before, he asks her. Scatter his ashes, after the funeral?
He tips his head in the direction of the urn on the bookshelf; the urn he’s pretended not to see for weeks.
And Josie tugs down her cardigan a little, as if in preparation for something.
Still in her summer dress and beige tights, her velvet slippers, the brooch his father bought her twinkling from her chest.
Nora is looking at him too, a few steps behind, but for once he is not looking at her as his mother lifts her chin and stares straight at him with her clear blue eyes.
Oh, Bren, she says, isn’t it obvious? I was waiting for you.
_
The garden at sunset is quiet and cast in shadow.
Light touching the tops of the trees that line the river as it flows, as it always has, behind the old oak.
Its trunk in the back of Freya’s; branches swung low into Josie’s.
Jon’s shed. Freya’s greenhouse. Long grass, rose bushes, thorns and trellis and overgrown nettles.
Nora stands on the lawn with Bren while Josie unlatches the gate, goes next door and brings Freya through.
She has changed into her artist’s smock – something oversized she wears to bed – and this is the first time Nora sees her, since she’s learned the truth.
Feet in her gardening shoes. Wild hair curly-wet, post-shower.
She feels an onrush of something that moves her even more than what they’re about to do, but she holds back, knowing that now is not the moment to reach out to her mother. To say she understands.
Josie goes back inside for her husband and the three others stand in silence while they wait.
New buds on the trees. Sweet smell, after rain.
Nora lets it all fill her. The relief of it, how she can mourn without the shame and the secret that had tainted her family and the man they’d all loved.
A man who was Bren’s father, Josie’s husband, Freya’s lover, everything to all of them – even though, as she’s learned, nobody can ever be one person’s entirely.
And then Josie is there with the urn in her hands and the four of them move towards the base of the oak, and the soil is dark and damp from the rainfall and it reminds Bren of the ocean, spreading on sand; he will tell her that later. Not now, though.
For this moment is not about them.
Josie lifts the lid – or at least, tries to, but it is screwed too tight, so Bren does it for her. Nora sees him keep the lid in his hand.
I feel like we should say something, Josie says. I don’t know what, though. Everything we said at the funeral was so …
Macabre, Freya nods.
And I feel like this isn’t, Josie says. I feel like this is how it was meant to be.
She glances at Bren, who is focused on the roots in the earth.
No words could do him justice anyway, he says.
It is dusk, now, the sunset gone. Stratus cloud, fade of blue.
No headstone. No music. Just them, in the place that Jon was, and is, with the grass and the river and the trees as they each take fistfuls of the man who was theirs and scatter him onto the soil and there is so much of him, so much more than they expected, it is sort of funny, after a while; eventually they pour the sand of him into the grass, Jesus, Bren says, he wasn’t even a big guy, how is this possible.
And despite the humour and the sweet smell of spring, Josie weeps.
Freya puts an arm around her, and Nora, in a leap of love and truth clasps her mother’s hand and lets her tears fall, too; Freya looks at her, astonished, but clasps it back.
Bren, though, does not cry, or reach for a hand.
All he does is touch his elbow, lightly, to Nora’s.
Tilts his head back, looks at the sky.