‘I’ll ring Granny, get her over here and she can tell you.’
‘She’ll lie too!’ he yells.
And it’s like my beautiful, gentle son has turned against me. He’s angry because I have hurt him. In trying to protect him, I did it all wrong.
Then all my plans not to fall apart disintegrate.
‘I love your dad, still love him, actually,’ I say, and now I’m really crying. ‘I love him for himself and I love him because he gave me you, but he died.’
‘You just say that,’ Luke shrieks at me.
‘Oh Luke,’ and I pull him to me. He’s in my arms crying like he used to when he was smaller. I suddenly feel so angry withJean-Luc because if only he was here, we wouldn’t be going through this. I’d be happy and Luke would be happy and he wouldn’t think he’d been abandoned.
‘We need help with this, Lukie. Some clever person who can talk to us and will talk about how it’s different when your dad dies instead of when he leaves.’
‘I don’t want to talk to anyone,’ he says mulishly.
‘We need to, darling. I’ve messed this up and we’re going to do it right. Plus, we’re going to talk more about your dad and you are going to tell me about how you feel, because you don’t talk about this anymore.’
‘Didn’t want to hurt you,’ he mutters, ‘because I knew Dad made you sad. I hated him for that.’
So I do the thing I haven’t done for a couple of years. I get down the big box of photos of pictures of myself andJean-Luc when we were younger and I go through it slowly, pointing out places we went, things we did.
‘See the way you are just like your dad there?’
‘Yeah,’ he says and he’s smiling again. It’s like he was afraid to ask, afraid of hurting me by bringing up his dad.
The pain nearly kills me. ‘Do you feel different in school?’ I say delicately, thinking of the Family Tree project. Why had I not been more ready for it?
‘Yeah, there are kids like me and Raffie, but most of them have two parents, even if they are divorced, they’ve got two. Some of them have stepmums and dads and that’s good and that’s bad. Henry hates his stepmum. Says she’s grumpy in the morning. But we just have you guys and the grannies and you know that’s different. The other kids have dads that take them places and play football with them and ... I don’t have that.’
‘You lost something precious, Luke, and so did I. And I thought it would be better if we just kept going, just you, me, Granny, Shazz, Norma and Raffie, and I thought we were family enough.’
‘You are, you are,’ my strong little boy says, ‘but just sometimes it’s – you know –’ he can’t find the words and I understand because I can’t find the words either.
‘OK, let’s talk about Dad more. We’ll go to France on holidays, see your granny and granddad there. Let’s write them an email now, OK?’
‘Why don’t they come over here?’ He’s still suspicious.
‘They did a little bit when you were younger, but it’s been sad for them too. They weren’t like Granny –’ I pause – ‘they didn’t want to travel too much.’
‘Why didn’t we travel to see them?’
The truth was I’d always feared that Geneviève,Jean-Luc’s mum, blamed me in some way. IfJean-Luc hadn’t been living in another country with me, he’d never have been killed. ‘I made a mistake and we are going to change that,’ I say firmly.
I turn a few more pages of the album. There’s the funny onesJean-Luc took of my belly as I was getting bigger. The ones he took of both of us with him on the timer and him kneeling down and kissing my growing bump.
‘See,’ I say, ‘he wanted you so much, darling. But your dad was very strong. He’d want us to miss him, because he was a super person and he’d want us to talk about him. But he would hate you to think that he didn’t want you or that he left you.’
‘No, I didn’t think that,’ Luke says suddenly, taking a deep breath, ‘it was just thisfamily-tree thing made me sad, and we have to bring in pictures.’
He’s being brave, my strong darling son.
‘How about we make it the best family tree in the class,’ I say fiercely, ‘the very best. We’re going to emailGrandmèreright now and see what wonderful pictures she can come up with, ones I don’t have.’
‘Maybe we could Skype her?’
‘Sure,’ I say. We’d tried Skyping when he was little and Geneviève, found it very painful to look at the little boy who looked so like her lost son. I should have pushed it. I shouldn’t have let the contact slip away. She’s his grandmother. I have to make this right.
