My life
The routines are different now, and then very much the same. Kit and Isabel stay in a B&B one street over, Ivo's inability to tolerate upheaval in the house exacerbated by old age and arthritis. Isabel and I still make a furtive effort at the traditional meal, saved almost entirely by the advent of pre-cooked packaged food that actually tastes like the real thing. She microwaves it and I put it on a dish so that it looks legitimate and we share a snicker in the kitchen, toasting with a shot of Ivo's best whiskey. Ah, modern life!
Kit and Ivo are content to watch the football matches and grumble about politics and the younger generation. Because things were oh so much better when they were young.
And not suffering from the aches and pains of age.
I helped him make his snowman yesterday. It was disproportionate and lumpy but no less a masterpiece than any other in the years past. It's simpler these days – a carrot nose and button eyes, no scarf or pipe or bowler hat – and I declared heartily that it was the best one yet. He frowned at me, pale blue eyes assessing me, clearly discontent. But, then, he is always discontented. Always was. That's half his charm.
I've learned. How to ignore his gruff rebukes and accept him for who and what he is. Much as he accepted me in my deplorable state decades ago. Take the good with the bad and all that. That's what long-term relationships are.
Back in the house I open my father's "Sergius", the Tolstoy safe that hides my treasures. It is the only thing I have never shared with Ivo. It was my father's secret, passed on to me. A rectangular wound in an old book that has always served as our repository, named Sergius after the first short story in the collection and the only one to survive the knife. From it I pull my pebble collection - my prayer beads, the talismans that steady me - and my last surviving picture of Danny.
He's in a field, surrounded by high wire. It might be a park. It might be a prison yard. It's a dark landscape, barren, lit only by a single streetlight that crowns him. And lordly, he stands over his sole subject - a short, stout snowman with a carrot nose and button eyes. He's grinning at me, those wolfish features mean and tantalizing. He plays rough, I imagine. He would have eaten me alive.
Then.
But not now. Now I know how to tame him.
I run my thumb across his pretty face and, thoughtful, put him back in the vault.