Chapter 23 #3
Lily doesn’t know why she keeps Bear’s phone charged on his bedside table.
Perhaps for the occasional texts or emails that arrive from someone who doesn’t know and the brief moment that allows her to imagine, in another life, if things had gone differently, he might be here to read it with his own eyes, to tap out a reply with his own fingers.
But one day it rings, an unexpected noise that makes Lily and Pearl look up from their jigsaw and pause.
They race up the stairs, desperate to get to it before it stops.
Pearl dives onto the bed as Lily taps the green button to answer.
There is a man on the other end. Can he speak to Bear?
A moment of silence, shock. An awkwardness in his recovery. Oh, he’s so sorry. So sorry to hear that. He’s calling about the electric car her husband ordered last year. She didn’t know? The pandemic has affected production, but it’s finally ready for delivery. Already paid for in full.
As the man talks, Lily pictures Bear poring over his bank account, squirreling away money for their first car.
They’ve never really needed one living so near town and the station, but she’s always wanted one.
Wanted to drive through the countryside listening to music.
To go on holiday without a taxi to take them the last leg of the journey.
To visit her parents and Cora without train times running through her head.
She pictures Bear online, researching. Pictures him in the showroom, her beautiful husband, doing something lovely for her in the middle of an ordinary day, before the world shut down.
Where was she then? Perhaps walking along the seafront, or at the library.
And she’d carried on, unaware. Of him, and this special thing.
Unaware, too, of what it is to have that person in your life, that person who will plan surprises, who will try to fix wings to your back.
Pearl, who has been listening in, her temple resting against Lily’s, says, “Ask what color it is, Mama!”
The man hears. “Black,” he says. Just what Lily would have chosen herself.
And now, 2022. They are two years on from Bear’s death.
And Pearl, this child they made together, is six.
She says, “Tell me the story of…” and Lily will tell her some tale featuring her magnificent father.
She will worry she’s turning him into a mythical god, some creature too good to have ever really walked this earth.
But she can’t dial him down. Make him less brilliant than he was.
“We were lucky, weren’t we, Mama?” Pearl says, and Lily nods.
One day, when Pearl is out with Maia, they meet an elderly couple with a puppy.
It pounces on leaves as they skitter in the wind, falls over its own feet, chases its tail, can barely sustain its line of interest before it is delighted by the next thing.
Maia asks if they can stroke it, and while the adults talk above her head, Pearl touches the dog’s velvety ears as it nudges her leg, wanting to get closer than it already is.
She catches snippets of what they’re saying: how dogs don’t need to live as long as humans, they’re simply so good at finding the joy in life.
As if we are put on this earth to extract a certain amount of happiness and can leave once the job is done.
“Is that like Papa, Bees?” Pearl asks as they walk away.
Maia’s breath catches and her eyes prickle. “Sort of,” she says, and she feels Pearl’s fingers spidering their way across her palm into her own.
“I’m glad you’re quite a serious sort of person,” Pearl says, squeezing her hand. And Maia understands her meaning; that she wants—needs—the rest of her people to stay for longer.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.”
Maia smiles, thinking of her little brother. Remembering how she’s always been in the shadow of his exuberance, his ability to make things special, but how that’s been her privilege. And now look at what he’s left them. Beautiful, capable Pearl.
“Tell me the story of my name,” Pearl says as she sits cross-legged on the draining board as they do the dishes together. And Lily tells her how it was. How Bear had said they should think about how their own names would fit with this new person who would complete them.
“Of course! Animal, vegetable, and mineral,” he’d said, delighted. “Her name should be a mineral.”
Lily had brought up a list on her phone. Jade, Ruby, Opal, Emerald, Crystal; reading out the names until…Pearl.
“Pearl,” Bear had repeated, trying it out for himself.
“But it says a pearl’s not actually a proper mineral.” And Lily had read out the explanation: “Although the pearl itself is made up of a mineral, its organic origin excludes it from being an official one.”
“It’s not like a lily is officially a vegetable either, though. More like vegetable matter,” he’d said, laughing.
Recently, Lily and Pearl have started playing the game together.
First question: animal, vegetable, or mineral?
Pearl tries to narrow down whatever it might be that Lily is thinking of, but when it’s her turn to dispense clues, she always says, “Animal,” to that first question.
Lily thinks up questions to lead her on a winding route to the answer she already knows.
“Is it…Papa?” she will eventually ask, and Pearl will smile, gratified.
The school days are long, and Pearl emerges exhausted.
Away from the gates, she asks for a piggyback, and even after a shift at the library, Lily plows up the hill, Pearl’s warm body draped across her back, empty lunchbox banging gently against her side.
Her hip burns beneath their combined weight, but it makes Lily feel more alive, pulled back into her body from the stupor of grief.
They are planning on getting a cat. “It’s not instead of Papa,” Pearl clarifies when she tells Cora about it.
And Cora nods approvingly, realizing they are inviting a creature back into their lives to maintain the trinity of animal, vegetable, mineral.
That there is a strength in deciding not to hobble on forever without that animal energy in their lives. Bear would be so proud.
It was during the first lockdown, before Bear died, when pavements and windows were still covered in hand-drawn rainbows, and every Thursday at 8 p.m. front doors were opened to clap for the NHS workers who cared for the sick, that Maia heard from him.
His letter arrived between bills and a pizza-delivery flyer.
She didn’t recognize his writing. Either because it had taken on the slight tremor of age, or perhaps because she’d erased it from some once-held mental file. And so, she read the first line, not realizing who the handwritten pages had come from.
Dear Maia,
I hope this finds you well. You may not remember—it may not even have been you—but years ago, 2009 perhaps—I believe we spotted one another in a traffic jam.
I was sure it was you and I think you recognized me too.
I’ve thought of you often since that time and I’ve wanted to write on many occasions, but out of respect for the new life you’ve surely built, I’ve been wary of intruding.
Somehow, the pandemic has changed things, though.
In my late seventies, with death lurking on every door handle, I have a greater sense of time being finite. Of contact being now or never…
She folded the letter and pushed it back into its envelope as though the contents might leap off the page into her mind uninvited if she didn’t put it away quickly enough.
She carried it around in her bag for days, feeling its presence, an outline of her father straining at her shoulder as she decided what to do.
She wondered how he’d found her address; it was years since she’d had any contact with her grandparents.
One afternoon, she packed away her patients’ case files early, and picked her way down the pebbled beach to sit in the shelter of a wooden groin.
She took out the pages again, aware this time that her fingers were touching paper that he, too, had held.
She looked up at the sky, hoping the sharp sea air might cleanse her of this, but she only had a sense of salt hanging heavy and setting the feeling.
Reluctantly, she looked down and began to read.
When she’d finished, she leaned against the sea defense. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed when Charlotte crunched onto the beach and sat down beside her.
“It’s a letter from my dad,” Maia said, turning over the corner of the envelope.
“It was him, that day in the traffic jam.” Charlotte was sifting her long fingers across the pebbles then.
“He’s writing to make peace, apparently.
To renew my faith in humanity. Our potential to change. ” Maia gave a little laugh.
“Has he? Changed, I mean,” Charlotte asked.
“Possibly. After he left prison, he went to some charity for domestic abusers. And, later, ended up working for them. He probably would’ve been good at that; he was actually a good doctor, before everything, Mum’s always said. A better doctor than husband, anyway.”
Charlotte was looking out to sea, but Maia knew she had her full attention. She had a knack for sensing when to wait, rather than ask questions.
“I have a half-sister, apparently. He actually had a new relationship. A normal one, he claims. Not anymore. But just because they fell out of love, he says, rather than anything more sinister. It doesn’t sound like the daughter has much contact with him, though. She’s seventeen.”
“Goodness. A sister. I’d never even thought of that,” Charlotte said.
“Me neither.” After a while, she added, “He apologized to me, in the letter. Also to Mum, and Bear. If I want to pass it on.”
“Do you think you’ll tell her?”
“I’m not sure what good it would do. Other than stir up a load of painful feelings.”
They sat in silence and eventually Charlotte said, “Will you reply?”