I really need her to listen now. To be on my side. This is the nearest I’ve ever gotten to what happened to you, to how I really feel, and I need her to look after me while I carefully unravel it all. The truth isn’t something I have been able to reach for a long time. It stands somewhere, always, around a corner in the back of my mind. In a place that I can’t get to. Always running parallel to me, and now I am turning to look at it. Whether I tell a lie or the truth now, I need Betty to hold me up while I do it.
‘It was a nightmare.’
If pressed, this is all I have ever been able to say on the matter.
Bloodied floor. Bloodied hair. Yes, I remember all of that brutal, feral night.
Her face remains stiff, unchanged as I expose you entirely. All of the ways that Jack loved you, and all of the ways that I loved you. The shape you took at the bottom of the stairs, the rapidly changing colour of your skin. Jack crying about the baby, and Peggy trying to run out of the house. Tom wrapping me up in a blanket; I still feel how tightly he wrapped me up, as though I was about to fall apart. How strange it isto tell her your name. Betty. Lillian. Two beams of light, intercepting each other.
‘Tom told me what happened, but I don’t know if I believe it. I haven’t stopped thinking about her, and how much I loved her.’
She won’t look at me. I press on.
‘I’ve realised that I love you in the same way.’
For a moment, she is quiet. If we could only exist as this moment. This silence. All the pressure relieved. All her mercy before me. At last, her voice. I feel it vibrate through the air and shake through my body.
‘Why don’t you believe Tom?’
The lovely, trembling journey of her voice through my body stops. My admission, ignored. My love, unwanted.
And I have to consider what she has said. Why don’t I believe Tom? I’m always drifting into daydreams, talking to Mammy, thinking of the past; when I’m told something happened I tend to believe it, because I’m so rarely in the moment to witness it. But something about this, I can’t believe. A deep, churning regret forms within me. I miss you. The birds sing. She meets me with a look of uncertainty.
Betty appears to be making her own sense of this. The last thing I wanted was for her to interpret this information for herself. I want to tell her a very solid version of the truth and have her understand it exactly as I tell it.
‘Because it never felt right. What he said doesn’t seem like something that I could have done.’
Oh Tom, oh Jack, always thinking of me, putting me first. Jack always curled up with Peggy against the fire, warming her little feet in his hands. Tom always looking after me, watching without blinking, as though to miss even a second of me would be punishable. Betty is frozen. This isn’t about Lillian, it’s about love. I want her to understandmy love. I cannot be misunderstood any longer.
‘I’m not sure of any of it, Betty, except how I feel about you. I’m sure of that.’
And suddenly, she is attentive.
‘Right. Okay, Anna. It’s okay, you’re okay.’
Okay. I’m okay. This is all I wanted. Betty on my side, telling me that everything is okay. She isn’t trying to shut me up, she understands me. I knew that she would.
I am coming near her again, at last. Oh, to be nearer to Betty.
I’ve never known such astonishing relief. I’ve never known such still, pale air; all that separates us now. The sun breaks over the hill, white light fills every space between us. Let me show her what this relief feels like.
Taking a risk, bringing myself to my home, I kiss her cheek. Secular flesh made holy. And I kiss the bone of her jaw. A silent, fat tear travels down the almighty curve of her cheek, and I welcome it into my mouth. Oh, yes, her tears are made of stars. Let me eat those stars. Her lustrous, salted eyes.
Wet grass against my ankles. Far-off sounds of a tractor’s engine. Her lips tighten. I kiss their corner, their centre. At last, I am within her cosmos.
Bliss, right before me. Not kissing me, but there to be kissed. Close to bliss, alright. You will never understand what this is like.
I know I must go before Tom catches me. It’s hard to leave, but no harder than any other time I’ve gone. She hurries me off, not wanting me to be caught, either. When I ask if I can come back soon, she smiles.
When I am gone, out and up the hill, I hear her saying my name. I hear her rejoicing, shrill, running down the field to tell Bill that she has just spoken to me. It takes everything not to turn around and wave at her.
Betty
AS QUICKLY AS SHE APPEARED,she is gone. A little smudge on the hill. Frozen, I pray to God that she will not turn around. I pray to God that whatever Anna is going to do next has nothing to do with me.
I run my teeth down my tongue and spit onto the grass. The cold of her lips on my face, now burning.
She loves me. A crush, I could handle. If it was a crush, grand. But she said that she loves me the way that she loved Lillian Kealey. And look where Lillian Kealey ended up. What was it that Anna swears she was incapable of, that Tom swears she did?
