She squeezes him into her and breathes again in that raspy way and it really seems like it is taking a lot of work for her just to breathe, and also like someone else should be coming in any minute now, and she asks him, “What about the day after tomorrow?”
“Well, I guess it’s school again and, um. It’s a Tuesday so we have art class. And gym. Do you think Sadie will come over to babysit?”
His mother does not respond. Her breaths are further and further apart, and her chest has just about stopped going up and down, and maybe she is sleeping, and he puts his head in the soft spot under her armpit and he keeps talking: “And the day after that, I don’t know, maybe it will be a snow day, and we won’t have to go to school. If you put a spoon under your pillow, it will happen, if everyone does it. I’ll bring one for you so you can do it too. And then we can come and hang out with you all day.”
Afterward, for weeks on end, he will not sleep an unbroken hour, in case he forgets to wake up.
When the doctor calls to Al, it is with more gravity than urgency. His name is the end of a sentence. Inside Susan’s room, his son is nestled in the space between her breast and her armpit, talking to himself. At one point, it is possible that he was talking to her but now she is very obviously dead.
“Sebastian.”
He didn’t plan it this way. He hadn’t planned for it to happen like this. He just left the room. He had only stepped out for a moment.
You don’t seem like the type of person who would want to leave in the wrong way.
He looks at her body. He always thought there would be a last conversation. That it wouldn’t be about walking with her to the bathroom. Or the choreography of their children, or the next round of scans or chemo. He had grown so used to it, the illness.I know what to do, he would think when she would start vomiting, and get the bag with her change of clothes and drive her to the care center, drink shitty coffee from the café, talk to her, wait, talk to the doctors, do what they said, know that she would feel worse and then better, administer increasingly powerful painkillers. And there was a kind of perverse happiness in this, in helping her, like they were sharing the project of their lives, unitedunder the goal of saving her. He felt, for the first time since they had been married, like a team. Like he imagined a husband was supposed to feel.
She looks so small.
When they try to pull Sebastian off of her, his son starts screaming, asking where they are taking her, agitated that no one seems able to describe where she is going, and Al is holding him and he is kicking and it isn’t fair.
“We weren’t done talking,” Sebastian says.
Until this moment (looking at the thing that used to be her body, assigning it a new word: corpse) he hadn’t let go of the ending he imagined for them. Walks on the seaside, wrinkled hand holding wrinkled hand, a dog. A shared sense of the world. All the happy continuum of life.When you get better, he got used to saying, because it felt important for everyone, the project of hope, the fantasy of the future. It only occurs to him now how many conversations they never had. Like, how she should be buried. What she should wear. Who should be told.
He could collapse. But here they are, his wide-eyed children, and he is the only thing standing between them and the end of the world.
2010
Viola walks down to the river, a cut-out shadow angling against stone. Even after a year, the limestone beauty of Cambridge has not ceased to affect her. She still wonders at the fact that she is here.
She knew it would be difficult for her father, her going.Be careful, he’d said.Lots of murders over there, I hear.Taxis hummed behind him, and she could see in the way he was leaning one hand on the car for support how her departure would shatter him. But looking around herself now, the choice feels inevitable. How could she not have been charmed by the Waugh and Forster of it, the stained-glass library light, the tall, wild stalks flourishing in hidden quads, the young ambitious bodies thirsting for knowledge and its distractions. At times she feels like she could stay here forever, wandering through a world of beautiful hypotheticals, growing closer to perfection, academia’s controlled infinity.
“Oy oy.”
Clapping her shoulder is her best friend, Niamh, in high-waisted jeans and septum piercing, her energy glowing like an LED light. They became friends out of the circumstance of adjacent rooms and inseparable out of a shared love of philosophy. At times, Viola feels she is taking an additional course in Niamh, learning how to write an essay on caffeine fumes and the remembered fragments of drunk conversation, how to conjure up the subtleties of intersectional feminism with an expertly raised eyebrow, how to correctly use the wordcraic.
“All right, stranger?” Viola ties her hair, long again and irrepressible, off of her neck and into a low ponytail, a piece falling to frame her mother’s delicate nose, her thick-lashed eyes.
“Yeaaaaah,” Niamh exhales. She pulls a pair of oversized sunglassesoff her buzzed head and onto her nose, and they take off alongside the river. Niamh came back last night in a state, arguing with her latest boyfriend on the phone. She always returns from weekends in London with a new fling. Her lovers have been, in turn, French, Portuguese, Ghanaian, Belgian-Somali, and Glaswegian.Cheapest way to take a world tour, she says. Men or women, she doesn’t exclude. She drops them as soon as they try to make her become anything she doesn’t want to be.
Niamh loops her arm through Viola’s and sighs. “Why can’t people understand: debt is a battering ram. It’s the principle of it. I just feel like relationships should be active. You shouldn’t have to force anyone into being with you today based on how they were with you yesterday.”
“I get that,” she says. “But I think commitment is romantic. Is that lame?”
“I don’t think there’s anything unromantic about prioritizing your own interests—particularly if that interest is pleasure,” Niamh says. “It’s trying to control other people that kills the mood.”
Viola thinks about this. “But I think promises have value. Otherwise, how else do you trust anybody? Or hold anybody accountable?”
Niamh laughs. “Anyone ever tell you you’d make a good lawyer?”
“Not in a while.”
“You’d make a killing in contracts.”
Niamh, whose papers read with a casual brilliance, has no interest in besting her, or trying to show up her deficiencies, or even trying to change her mind—her manner is entirely sincere. She only insists on drawing Viola’s attention to complexities she avoids looking at.
The river courses darkly, a cold continuum traversing out to the North Sea. They turn away, and the damp autumnal streets of Cambridge gather around them, cobbles and ancient walls.
