Chapter IV
"Mama! Up!" Angela said, walking into the kitchen from the sitting room, tugging at the purple hem of Shelagh's new apron which had replaced the bloodied yellow one. Shelagh looked down at her daughter, who was reaching up, her fists clenching and unclenching impatiently. A week of rest at home, the doctor had advised, but Shelagh was having none of it. She leaned down and picked Angela up, setting her on the kitchen counter.
"Will you help me with this?" Shelagh asked. "It's got to be ready before the boys get home," she added seriously. Angela nodded solemnly, her brown eyes wide. Her mother laughed, then turned back to the strawberry rhubarb pie. The edges of the crust were pinched neatly halfway around, like feathers.
"Oh!" Angela gasped, pointing at the gooey red center.
Shelagh raised her eyebrow, then dipped a finger into the center, licked it, and smiled. "Delicious!"
Angela kicked her feet against the lower cabinets in excitement, and licked Shelagh's offered finger, the syrupy pie filling staining her mouth a darker red. "Delicious!" she mimicked, and laughed at her mother's smile of delight at the new word.
"Now, we have to make this crust look the same on both sides," Shelagh said, demonstrating how to pinch the soft crust together. Angela copied her with clumsy fingers, strawberry rhubarb filling sticking to her hands in the process. Petula Clark was on the wireless, and Shelagh hummed along, watching her daughter go about this simple process and thinking that there was nothing more lovely in this world than a child discovering something new in their world.
Timothy hurried home. He had been told by his father to come straight home after school. To keep his mother company until Patrick had finished his rounds. It was five days after Timothy had ruined the car, after the hellish hours at the hospital, after he'd watched his father clean the bathroom until there was no trace of what had happened. When he mentioned that her apron was missing the morning she was to come home his father had given him a one pound note to go to the shops and find another one, any color, to replace it. Blushing, Timothy had picked the first one he found. It was plain, the color labeled as "lavender", not flowered like the other one had been. Yellow would not look the same to him for many years.
The sound of giggles greeted him when he opened the door, and he hung up his jacket, following their sound to the bathroom. Angela had bubbles on her head, and there were even some in his mother's hair as she bathed his little sister. It was a treat for Angela to spend whole days with her mother.
Angela pointed at Timothy, then clapped her hands. "Timothy!" she announced, and Shelagh turned, smiling openly.
"Hello, dear. I'll just finish up with Angela so it will be quieter while you do your homework." She stood from the floor and reached for a towel, then frowned at the expression on Timothy's face, that of concern. "Are you all right, Timothy?"
He shrugged. "I'm fine. Happy to see you."
Shelagh chuckled. "You don't look it! Did something happen at school?" She went back to Angela, washing the bubbles off with warm bathwater and then helping her up, wrapping her in a towel and lifting her out of the tub.
"No, nothing happened. I'll get started on my homework."
His mother shrugged, then watched as Angela went to her brother. "Books," she said confidently. Timothy reached down to touch her nose, and she wriggled away.
"That's right, Angela. Lots of books!"
Patrick ducked into the sitting room to find his son sitting at the small table, apparently buried in homework. Timothy looked up at the sound of footsteps.
"Where is she?" Patrick asked softly.
Timothy gestured down the hall with his head. "Reading to Angela."
His father sighed, then went to pull out a chair and sit with his son. "History again tonight, is it?" he asked, looking down at Timothy's notes. His son nodded.
"I finished ages ago."
Patrick wrinkled his forehead. "Then why are you still sitting here? How's your mother?"
"She's fine. She made a pie with Angela this afternoon."
There was something in Timothy's voice that made his words sound dull. Patrick could hear Shelagh's voice softly talking to Angela. Timothy sighed, putting down his pencil.
"I don't understand it, Dad!" he exclaimed in a whisper. "How can she be fine? Happy even? It's like nothing's happened."
Patrick shook his head. "Your mother may process things differently than you do. Perhaps it's easier for her to move ahead with things. And you have to remember, she doesn't remember much from that night," he tried to explain. "You do."
"There was so much blood," Timothy said quietly. "And in the hospital…" He closed his eyes, then opened them to look up at his father. "Her face was white as paper. And then two days later she comes home and it's like nothing's happened. 'Let's bake a pie! Let's read a bedtime story!'" He chuffed out a laugh of disbelief.
Patrick smoothed out Timothy's hair. His son was growing up quickly, and even more so in the past week it seemed. But he would forever be the small boy who loved football, the boy who memorized the human skeleton at eight years old. "You don't remember it, Timothy, but it was the same for us just a few years ago."
Timothy's eyes cleared as he realized what comparison his father was making. "When I had polio."
Patrick nodded. "We stayed by you in the hospital every moment we could. She was with you whenever I couldn't be. She yelled at Mr. Cooper to drive you to the hospital."
"I don't remember that," Timothy remarked, surprised that their neighbor had never mentioned it.
"Just like she doesn't remember you driving her there. Maybe a foggy memory, but nothing more."
The line of worry that had frequented Timothy's brow for the past week smoothed. "She wasn't even my mother yet when I had polio." Patrick smoothed his son's hair again. They heard the door to Timothy and Angela's room open further as Shelagh slipped out.
"Someone would like two goodnight kisses," she said, and brightened at the sight of her husband. He and Timothy got up from the table to go to Angela. Shelagh looked up and received a gentle forehead kiss from Patrick as Timothy walked past. "I'm glad you're home."
"So am I." Patrick gave her another kiss. "Now, you sit down. I can heat up my own dinner once Angela relinquishes us." Shelagh smiled, and they both knew that she wouldn't sit down until his dinner was warmed and ready.
1942
Her childhood room would look the same with her gone. A suitcase was propped against her bed carrying only what she would need. She looked around slowly, committing the room to memory. There was a small desk in front of the only window. The white paint had begun to chip long ago, but she thought it added to its simple charm. She sat in the chair and opened the only drawer which ran the length of the desk. Inside there were used graphed lesson books from school, beside them an old postcard that had never been written on, Monet's lilies had faded with time.
Shelagh picked up her mother's shiny pen, the one she'd thought was so special because the cartridges were sold in the shops. The first month she'd had it she was going into town once a week for a new one, tagging Shelagh along. It hadn't been used in nine years.
She cleared her throat and stood from the desk, then went out from the room and into the kitchen. All the dishes were clean and drying, she'd done them herself. A towel was folded neatly over the faucet that ran only cold water. Outside, the light was already fading, although there was a peachy tint to the horizon line that rarely appeared. She'd grown up with foggy sunsets.
The back door was open, and there was a chill. She took the fisherman's sweater and shoved her feet into her muddy galoshes, then stood on the steps, scanning the farm for what suddenly shook her as the last time.
Shelagh walked downhill on the small, winding path, forged by years of countless footsteps, and past the empty stables. The pigs shuffled in their pen as she walked by, disturbed but uninterested in her. The fields hadn't been tidy since they'd gotten rid of the cows last year, and when she reached them she saw how tall the grass was. It swished across her boots as she walked through the first field, following the smushed path cut by someone else earlier that afternoon who wore bigger shoes than her. The gate was open, and leaning on the fence at the end of the second field stood her father. The grasses, gently shifting in an evening breeze, were like the sea, and him a small rowboat tethered to a pier.
She brushed her hair behind her ears and forged ahead, drawing the wool of the jumper tighter around her. It was the tail end of September, and the colder months were fast approaching. She walked slowly and purposefully toward him, the wind blowing her light hair across her face, and when she had crossed the second field, where the grass grew even longer, she saw her father looking at the horizon line carved by a nearby hill. He turned at the sound of her, blinked as if awakened from a daydream, and uncrossed his arms. There were tears in his eyes.
"Dad?" She went to him.
"I thought I was looking at your mother," he said, overcome, and ran a hand down her arm, over the heavy jumper his wife had loved so much. Shelagh smiled sadly. They stood together side by side, and she tried to find the spot on which his eyes lingered in front of them, even as the sky continued to fade.
"Sometimes I look out and think I'll see her. Just in the garden picking wildflowers. Or maybe she'll walk to me with a chicken egg in each palm, still warm." He paused for a moment. "We really loved each other, you know. And when you came along it was like I'd been given even more of her to love. I used to watch you two together, Shelagh." He wiped a hand across his eyes and pulled her closer with the other around her shoulders. Shelagh subtly turned them and slowly began to lead him back to the cottage.
"You were so small when you were born, I didn't think you'd live. But she never believed it. She always told me, 'You'll see, she's strong'." She took his hand.
Shelagh smiled to herself as they walked through the fields, now in silence. He wasn't crying anymore. His hand was warm in hers, or maybe her hand had warmed his. Holding hands was a way of speaking when no words could possibly convey the message properly. At the beginning of the small footpath her father let her hand go. "You have her voice," he said suddenly. "Whenever you talk, I hear her voice."
She stopped with him, and he tipped her chin up to look at him. The only thing he had given her was her eyes. A clear green-blue. Her mother's had been brown. "Sometimes I don't talk to you because I'm afraid of your voice. Maybe you'll say the exact same sentence she said once, and I'll think it's her."
Shelagh shook her head, and her eyes were red-rimmed. "I'm not a ghost, Dad," she whispered, her voice breaking.
He ran a thumb across her cheek. It was rough with a lifetime of hard work. "And you're still leaving, then?"
She nodded. "Tomorrow."
Shelagh turned in bed, uneasy. It was a memory she'd never relived. Suddenly she was standing at the gate again the next morning, looking back at the cottage before she left home, seeing him through the window. She knew she was dreaming, yet in her dream she closed her eyes.
Wood smoke rises from the chimney, and through the window she can almost see her mother leaning over a table. She runs toward the house. She can feel the cold wind against her cheeks. She reaches out her hand.
And because her head was full of dreams, for a moment she believed she could open the door and go right through it.
She pulled back the sheets and slithered out of bed, leaving the room silently on tiptoe even though the carpeting disguised most noises. Even in the dark she was able to find Patrick's coat, to slip her hand deep into the inner pocket and find his tin of Henley's. She was fourteen again, sneaking a cigarette in the round quiet of two in the morning. She lit it with a kitchen match.
The front window in sitting room didn't open quietly, so she perched on the counter as Angela had before and directed the first exhale out the window. Her lungs warmed instantly, and the unsettling dream faded away with each stream of smoke. It looked like breath on a cold day.
When she was young, at school, angered by the stress of education or wound tight in adolescent stubbornness, Shelagh sometimes wished she could forget how much she loved her mother. It was an eerie thought she came across on the darkest nights, when she held her own hand and pretended that one was her mother's.
But then, to actually forget —could feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of her heart. She had heard once that this pain could be converted, as it were, by accepting "the fundamental impermanence of all things". This acceptance bewildered her: sometimes it seemed an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often she felt herself rocking between them, seasick.
I love you, Angela.
Why?
"I thought we'd given up smoking." She could hear the indulging smile in Patrick's voice even before she saw him through her clouded vision.
"I thought we had, too," she said. "Only I found some in your coat."
He shrugged. "I keep them there to remind me not to smoke them."
Shelagh's stomach dropped. "Oh, I didn't know! Look at me!" She stamped out the cigarette on the windowsill, embarrassed. Patrick looked at her, then went to lean against the counter. It was odd that she should be taller than him, sitting on the counter.
"I had a dream," she said, her legs dangling. "It was so real I could taste it."
He sometimes couldn't believe how lucky he was to witness this side of her. The Shelagh that perched on a countertop in the middle of the night after stealing a cigarette, the woman that was lost without her glasses, yet forgot them constantly while at home, the Shelagh that sometimes held their baby and swayed gently to music during the BBC's classical music hour.
"What about?" he asked.
Shelagh sighed. "About my father." She took his offered hand and was hopped quietly off the counter. The floor was cold beneath her bare feet. She wrapped her arms around him and put her head sideways on his chest as if to hear his heart. "It's strange," she said, her voice muffled slightly by the fabric of his nightshirt. "I keep dreaming of my childhood. They're not bad dreams. Just…unexpected."
I love you,
I love you as the birds love morning.
I love you as plants love the sun.
As travelers love the stars.
Like a field of flowers.
I love you.
Author's Note: Seriously, I wrote everything except the flashback scene in about an hour. All writing comes to me when I'm supposed to be packing up my apartment and moving! I'm not even going to dig deep and research to make sure there aren't unintentional historical inaccuracies. We'll all just have to deal. I had some notes on how this chapter would go, but I completely took a different path and...here you go. A special thank you goes out to thatginchygal over on Tumblr. You can find me there as josietyrell. I would love to hear from you! Not much really happens in this chapter. Hopefully this fic isn't getting too slow and boring.
For anyone who's interested, here's the music I listened to while writing this: "Schöner fremder Mann", sung by Connie Francis (scene with Angela), "King Of Hearts, Le Repos", by Georges Delerue (Timothy coming home, conversation with Patrick), "Syriana (piano solo)", by Alexandre Desplat (dream scene), and "Nocturne No. 21 in C Minor, Op. Posth.," by Chopin (night scene).