“Things changed,” he said, “after your brother. After Daniel. Things were different then.”
I couldn’t be certain I’d ever heard my dad say Daniel’s name and the effect was to freeze me. There were so many things I wanted to say, to ask, that they swamped one another and I managed only, “Oh.”
“It was a terrible thing.” His voice was slow and even, but his bottom lip betrayed him, a strange, involuntary mobility that made my heart constrict. “A terrible thing.”
I touched his arm lightly, but he didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were fixed on a patch of carpet by the door; he smiled wistfully at something that wasn’t there, before saying, “He used to jump. He loved it. ‘I jump!’ he’d say. ‘Look, Daddy, I jump!’ ”
I could picture him then, my little big brother, beaming with pride while he took clumsy frog leaps around the house. “I would have liked to know him.”
Dad planted his hand on top of mine. “I’d have liked that, too.”
The night breeze toyed with the curtain by my shoulder and I shivered. “I used to think we had a ghost. When I was little. I sometimes heard you and Mum talking; I heard you say his name, but whenever I came into the room you stopped. I asked Mum about him once.”
He looked up and his eyes searched mine. “What did she say?”
“She said I was imagining things.”
Dad lifted one of his hands and frowned at it, spidered his fingers into a loose fist, scrunching an invisible piece of paper as he gave a rumpled sigh. “We thought we were doing the right thing. We did the best we could.”
“I know you did.”
“Your mum …” He tightened his lips against his sorrow and a part of me wanted to put him out of his misery. But I couldn’t. I’d waited such a long time to hear this story—it described my absence, after all—and I was greedy for any crumb he might share. He chose his next words with a care that was painful to watch. “Your mother took it especially badly. She blamed herself. She couldn’t accept that what happened”—he swallowed—“what happened to Daniel was an accident. She got it into her head that she’d brought it on herself somehow, that she deserved to lose a child.”
I was speechless, and not just because what he described was so horrid, so sad, but because he was telling me at all. “But why would she think such a thing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Daniel’s condition wasn’t hereditary.”
“No.”
“It was just …” I struggled for words that weren’t “one of those things,” but failed.
He folded over the cover of his spiral notebook, laid it evenly on top of theMud Man,and set them on the bedside table. Evidently, we wouldn’t be reading tonight.
“Sometimes, Edie, a person’s feelings aren’t rational. At least, they don’t seem that way on the surface. You have to dig a little deeper to understand what lies at the base.”
And I could only nod because the day had already been so bizarre and now my father was reminding me about the subtleties of the human condition and it was all just too topsy-turvy to compute.
“I’ve always suspected it had something to do with her own mother, a fight they’d had years before, when your mum was still a teenager. They became estranged afterwards. I never knew the details, but whatever your gran said, Meredith remembered it when she lost Daniel.”
“But Gran would never have hurt Mum, not if she could help it.”
He shook his head. “You never can tell, Edie. Not with people. I never liked the way your gran and Rita used to gang up on your mother. It used to leave a bad taste in my mouth. The two of them setting against her, using you to create a wedge.”
I was surprised to hear his reading of the situation, touched by the care in his voice as he told me. Rita had implied that Mum and Dad were snobs, that they’d looked down on the other side of the family, but to hear Dad tell it—well, I began to wonder whether things weren’t quite as clear as I’d supposed.
“Life’s too short for rifts, Edie. One day you’re here, the next you’re not. I don’t know what’s happened between you and your mum, but she’s unhappy and that makes me unhappy, and I’m a not-quite-old-yet chap, recovering from a heart attack, whose feelings must be taken into account.”
I smiled, and he did, too.
“Patch it up with her, Edie love.”
I nodded.
“I need my mind clear if I’m to sort out thisMud Manbusiness.”
ISATon top of my bed later that night with the letting pages spread out before me, doodling circles around flats I hadn’t a hope of affording and wondering about the sensitive, funny, laughing, crying young woman I’d never had the chance to know. An enigma in one of those dated photographs—the square ones with the rounded corners and the soft, sun-shadowed colors—wearing faded bell-bottoms and a floral blouse, holding the hand of a little boy with a bowl haircut and leather sandals. A little boy who liked to jump, and whose death would soon despoil her.
