Chapter 23 #2
Pearl’s bottom lip quivers. She nods. “A wasp.”
And Lily has seconds to perform a magic trick. Seconds to avert what is now inevitable. Though she has no magician’s hat from which to draw some life-saving elixir. No magic wand to wave.
But then the seconds are gone. And only frantic, disbelieving minutes follow, minutes where hope is clung to like a punctured life raft.
Where breath is blown into a throat drawn closed; where small, dimpled fingers conscientiously tap the digits 9-9-9 into her mother’s phone; where bargains are made with an unfamiliar God; where paramedics glide toward them under a passage of blue lights, still believing there’s someone to save.
Hours—or perhaps a lifetime—later, Lily and Pearl arrive back to a house steeped in darkness. Their key in the lock feels alien. And when they turn on the hall light, it dazzles them.
A terrible silence curls into every corner of every room and stays for days.
Their voices get lost in it. Their words come out like sponges thrown against rock, bouncing off and then falling to the ground, no hope of cutting through.
They move around the house like creatures lost in the woods.
They cling to each other, not leaving one another’s side.
A glass of water, a trip to the loo, a forgotten handkerchief, something left in the next room; they move as one, not wanting to let the other out of sight.
They follow government guidelines and only meet family outdoors.
A few days before the funeral, they sit on the promenade with Bees and Charlotte, looking out to sea.
“Have one, Mama,” Pearl says, holding out her paper bag of chips.
The vinegar catches in Lily’s throat, making her cough, and a woman walking past pulls her mask higher on her nose pointedly.
They look at her retreating back—broad and well padded, insulated by the belief that the virus is the only risk.
“She’d do better tutting at the uneven paving slabs,” Charlotte says.
“Oh, God, don’t. It’s as if you’re wishing it on her,” Maia says.
Lily laughs, a small, guilty sound. But one that spreads to the others, growing into a honking, howling, roaring thing, making their shoulders shake and their eyes water.
Until—inevitably—the laughter tumbles over itself.
And this part, at least, Pearl understands.
Back at home, they sit on the sofa and Pearl lowers her cheek to the seat cushion. “Is this where Papa died?” she asks, knowing it is, but needing Lily to say the words out loud. Again, and again. As though it can only be made believable in the retelling.
They do jigsaw puzzles, build LEGO towers, read stories, and with each piece placed, each block stacked, every page turned, Lily feels Bear’s absence.
One day they make scones and as they press the cutter down through the thick rolled pastry, Lily is astounded that Bear can be dead, and they are left here baking.
That the world is continuing to turn. That she is continuing to function.
“Is Papa going to be dead forever?” Pearl asks.
“Yes,” Lily says, the word falling like a stone through water.
Pearl sleeps in the big double bed and Lily, careful not to wake her, goes into the bathroom throughout the night to sob into her hands, streetlight falling through the window, illuminating their toothbrushes.
Bear’s is already stiffening with lack of use.
She rinses it, wanting to bring it back to life.
But it immediately feels like she’s washed away the thing that made it worth keeping, and she places it in the bin.
Fourteen to thirty-two. It is not, was not, enough.
She wants to grow old with him. She wants to feel his arms around her.
She wants to bury her face in the biscuit-scented warmth of his neck.
Cora has spent the past few days visiting the gardens where she used to work.
The owners have let her have her old key.
She has knelt beside the peonies, tears spilling onto the earth, watching the tight ball of their petals loosen a little each day, willing them to brim open at just the right moment.
To throw back their heads and sing—to be at their most glorious—on the morning her son leaves this world.
On the morning his lovely body is turned to dust.
Now, as she gets out of her car, the dawn chorus greets her.
She lets herself into the gardens through the creaking gate, walks the gravel paths, crosses the orchard lawn, its grass wet with dew.
And finds the peonies perfect. Generous.
Whole-hearted. Like Bear. She lowers her face to them, buries her nose deep in their centers, lets their petals caress her cheeks.
Her trousers soak through at the knees. When she feels she’s spent enough time here—but when will she ever have spent enough time here?
—she pulls back. She takes a favorite pair of snippers from her bag.
She’s used to hard pruning, to cutting things back, but she’s never grown flowers for cutting.
She dithers over the first bloom, craning to assess each specimen from all angles.
Finally, she chooses one. The first, she thinks, will not be the best, but still a good one.
She supports the base of its head between two fingers, and with the other hand, she positions the blades lower down the stem, and cuts.
The funeral is socially distanced, mourners isolated in their bubbles, their numbers capped.
Cora has Mehri, but she cannot touch her granddaughter, cannot reach across the void to pull Lily into an embrace. And so they stand in the car park beforehand, sobs muffled by face masks. Offers of comfort falling short, landing somewhere in the two meters that divide them.
Through the windows of the hearse, Cora can see the spray of peonies, hydrangeas, and eucalyptus adorning Bear’s coffin.
The flowers are beautiful. They look exactly as she’d hoped.
But the intimacy of the days she spent minding them…
taking them to the florist and sitting on her doorstep this morning, talking quietly before the town woke… that softness, is gone.
Inside, they sit apart. The chapel, their words, their movements, live-streamed so that people Cora has never met—Bear’s friends, his colleagues from the museum, contacts from all over the world—can sit at their computer screens and watch.
Observing their grief. She hopes the image is too blurry to pick up how Bees’ back shudders throughout the service; she hopes the sound quality is too poor to capture the low animal moan Pearl emits as the curtain draws around the coffin.
In the middle of her reading, Cora looks up and sees the camera’s intrusive eye.
She muddles her words, but she doesn’t care if they notice.
In a fleeting rush of rage, she hopes it makes them uncomfortable, she hopes it makes them look away.
Even though none of this is their fault.
“I feel like I have nothing,” Maia tells Lily one night on the phone. “Like he was there, and now he’s not, and I can’t make sense of it. The lack of…of anything in between.”
It’s not logical or kind, but sometimes Lily feels as though she and Pearl may be left with even less of him if she acknowledges what anyone else meant to Bear, but still, she finds herself saying, “Did you know about the dream he used to have?”
“I don’t think so—what dream?”
“About you. He’d had it ever since he left home.”
“Oh,” Maia says, and Lily can tell this is something she hasn’t heard before.
Lily pictures Maia in her familiar living room, puffy-eyed, just wanting something. And surely, she can give her this? So she takes a breath. “In the dream, he was dying—”
“I’m sorry—I’m not sure I can do this right now. I thought it was going to be something nice.”
“I know it sounds bad, but really, Bees, I think you’ll want to hear. I think it might help.”
Lily hears Maia catch her breath and knows she’s crying again.
When she doesn’t say anything more, Lily goes on.
“In the dream, it was always the same. He wasn’t sure of the cause, but he knew he was dying, and he was terrified and alone.
But then you were there. Pushing him on a swing or mouthing lines to him in a school play.
All different things. But it would always end in the same way.
In a race—like on sports day. He was winning but didn’t want to be.
And he’d have this dread. Of getting to the finish line, knowing there’d be this white ribbon across it, and that when it broke across his chest, that would be it.
But then you’d appear in the crowd. He said he always felt so happy and relieved you’d come.
He’d run backward to try to stay level with you, but then, no matter how hard he fought it, he’d be pulled toward the ribbon anyway.
But he wasn’t scared anymore. He only told me about it because I got fed up with him yanking the duvet around him.
I’d always end up wide awake, but he’d go straight back to sleep with this contented look on his face.
He said that was how it had always been for him: that you were always there, always making him feel safe and loved. ”
“Oh,” Maia says, in a small and wavery voice. Lily sits listening to her breathe. “Thank you,” she says eventually.
“I should have told you earlier,” Lily says. “But maybe I’d wanted it to be me who could be the one to comfort him like that. I’ve kept wondering, though, if you were there with him—on the sidelines—when he actually died.”