Cohen looked at where their hands were joined. Esther’s fingers were so slim, tiny in the palm of his hand. It seemed impossible that this woman once held him in her arms.
But she had.Many times over.
‘Yes,’ Cohen said, nodding slowly. ‘Yes. I understand.’
‘Do you mean that?’ Esther asked, squeezing his fingers. ‘Tell me again, Cohen. I can’t bear for us to be like ... to be like we’ve been this last decade. I want my baby boy back, Cohen. I want you to be my baby again, like you used to be.’
‘I understand, Mother. I do.’ Cohen returned the squeeze, a light pressure against Esther’s fingers. ‘But I can’t be your baby again. We can’t go back to that.’
Not yet, he thought. His relationship with his mother had, for too long, been a wound allowed to fester. This conversation was a compress of a bandage long overdue but it would take time, Cohen realised, for the wound to fully heal. He hoped it would.
Esther looked stricken at his words, and so Cohen cleared his throat. ‘But I can be your son, Mother. And you can be my mother. And we can see where things go from there.’
‘You want us to be ... friends?’ Esther asked, almost hopefully.
Cohen suddenly recalled Rushi and her querying words. Rushi, who had been a parent to River but never a friend. And he smiled.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s try being friends,as well asmother and son. I think I’d like that.’
And now Esther smiled. ‘Friends, yes. Alright then.’
Cohen smiled back. ‘I think a friend would have offered another drink by now,’ he hinted. ‘I drink my coffee black.’
‘But caffeine—’ Esther began, before Cohen cut her off with a laugh.
‘Mother, I’m six-foot-two. Do youreallystill think caffeine will impact on my height? God, I almost hope it does. I already struggle to find shoes and shirts that fit.’
‘Well, you didn’t get your height from me,’ Esther told him, getting up to turn on her coffee machine.
For a moment, Jim’s name was a lingering presence in the room, and they both fell silent.
‘I miss him,’ Cohen admitted quietly, his words cutting into the void.
‘Yes. So do I, sometimes,’ Esther replied with a sigh.
‘I wish I’d gone to him,’ Cohen added, his voice firm. ‘I wish to God I hadn’t let him die in that hospice, all alone.’
Esther’s face softened, her eyes suddenly filling with tears once more. She reached out, taking Cohen’s hand. ‘Oh, baby, he didn’t die alone.’
Cohen looked up sharply. ‘What?’
‘Your father didn’t die alone, baby. I was there. I went to him. I sat with him. I was there when he died.’
Cohen stared at her. ‘But you never said anything ...’
Esther shrugged, using her free hand to brush away her tears. ‘You always got so angry when he was mentioned ... and you didn’t even go to the funeral ... it just seemed easier to brush it all under the carpet, you know?’
Cohen nodded. ‘How was he? In the ... at the end?’
Esther cleared her throat, squeezing Cohen’s fingers, before moving to the coffee machine to start a steady rush of hot water. She clearly didn’t want to talk about this.
‘Please, Mother. I have to know,’ Cohen pressed her.
Esther nodded, a reluctant but resigned movement. ‘He was tired mostly,’ she began. ‘He wanted to talk about the old days. Israel came to see him too, they had a laugh together.’ She looked at him pointedly. ‘He wanted to talk about you, when he was lucid. Wanted to talk about you when you were a baby. But when he was out of it on the drugs they gave him ...’ Esther bit her lip. ‘He mainly spoke nonsense. He was in such pain by the end. He couldn’t bear for anyone to touch him. Every press on his skin hurt him.’
Cohen shuddered.
Esther suddenly gave an impish smile. ‘But he wasn’t in such pain that he didn’t try and steal a few kisses from me,’ she admitted. ‘He was always trying to steal kisses from me. He was such a scoundrel, your father. A completeganef, from beginning to end.’
