No one spoke. Around her, Jess could hear the ambient hum of other people’s lives, but inside her head the prospect played itself out like a movie she wasn’t sure she wanted to see: Jess, Lily and their mum playing happy families in New York as if the last twenty-eight years had never happened; the three of them walking through Central Park, watching boaters on the lake and stepping out of the path of speeding skaters; drinking coffee on the High Line and looking out across the Hudson to New Jersey; navigating their way around the labyrinthine rooms of the Met and marvelling at the views from Top of the Rock. Her mum smiling and laughing, one final wish granted.
The fantasy tugged at Jess’s heart. It would be so easy to let out a single word that would make her mum happy. But then a memory crept into her head: lying in bed with Zoe that final night, reading her poems, watching her eyelids flutter, wishing she could share whatever deep sleep her sister was in, not knowing then that it would be the last time she would ever see her. Not knowing that the next morning she would spy Lily emerging from the spare room, see her barricade herself against the door and watch the guilt, fear and panic burn in her eyes.
‘I can’t. I’m sorry, I just can’t.’
‘You have to, Mum! First-class tickets to New York? You can’t say no. I’ll go with Granny if you don’t want to.’
Jess shook her head, confirming a decision she knew to be right.
‘Why not, Mum? It’s five days, that’s all. Stop being so selfish. It’s not all about you, you know.’ Mia’s voice was laced with frustration.
Jess looked at her daughter, wishing there was some way to explain the past without having to tell her anything at all. ‘Mia, please. There are lots of things you don’t understand.’
‘Oh, I know. You’ve been telling me my whole life there are things I don’t understand: that I’m too young or they’re too complicated. But don’t you think you owe it to Granny, to Aunt Lily, to tell them at least why you won’t go?’
Aunt Lily. Three short, clipped syllables and yet enough to cause all the moisture to evaporate from Jess’s mouth.
She looked at the four of them, watching her, waiting for an explanation they thought they wanted to hear, an explanation that, once heard, could never be unheard. A story that would haunt them just as it had haunted Jess all these years. She knew she couldn’t do it to them. She wouldn’t do it to her mum. ‘I can’t. It’s complicated. I just can’t.’ Jess looked down, picked at the skin around the base of her thumbnail, tore at the cuticle until the first drop of blood oozed through.
‘Please reconsider, Jess. It’s only five days. Just five days with both of you – that’s all I’m asking.’
Jess watched as her mum reached across the table, as familiar fingers enfolded her hand and a sequence of memories flickered into view.
Waiting outside the classroom with Zoe, her collar rubbing against her neck, the line of pegs hanging with coats, bags and cardigans: so many, how would she ever find out who they all belonged to? Something invisible bouncing around her stomach, like jumping beans. And then the squeeze of her mum’s hand reassuring her that her first day at school was going to be OK.
Perched on a stool in the kitchen, hot tears soaking her cheeks, her left forefinger bent at an angle that even a seven-year-old could see wasn’t right, her discarded bike lying on the kitchen floor, wheels still spinning. Her mum grabbing the car keys, calling to Lily to look after Zoe, mentions of hospitals and breakages and emergency departments. And then the clutch of her mum’s hand telling her there was nothing that couldn’t be fixed.
Queuing to enter the graduation hall, conscious of curious eyes flitting from her face to her tummy, its gentle curve concealed by the generous cut of her gown. Self-consciousness pinching her cheeks while the palm of her hand rested over the place where six inches of life was just beginning to swallow, suck its thumb, hear Jess’s voice. And then the clasp of her mum’s hand telling her she was proud of her, whatever the circumstances.
Lying on the sofa, Mia curled up on her chest, at eight days old still preferring the foetal position she had been accustomed to inside Jess’s womb. Jess’s head heavy with fatigue, her breasts aching with the milk Mia was not yet able to drink despite repeated, frustrating attempts to help her latch on. And then the gentle fingers of her mum’s hand telling her she could do this, she could be a good mother.
Sitting in an armchair, legs hugged tightly against her chest where panic knocked at a door she was too scared to open, Mia at her feet, pulling at threads on a rug Jess could not imagine ever being able to replace now that she was a single parent. Single parent. The phrase throbbing in her head, too new to feel real, less than three days since Iain had left her. And then the encircling of her mum’s hand around hers telling her that this was not the end, just a different beginning, one she was capable of surviving.
A lifetime of love, reassurance and pride expressed through the gentle containment of one hand inside another.
And then a more recent memory: sitting in the concert hall just a few hours earlier, watching her mum sing, feeling Mia’s hand inside hers and knowing there would never be anything at once so simple and yet so complicated, so straightforward and yet so profound, as a child’s hand held inside their mother’s. A gesture which she had, for so many years, taken for granted.
As Jess glanced between her mum and her daughter she had an image of a future she hoped never to encounter: of sitting where her mum was now, Mia opposite, Jess asking her daughter for something so small – so undemanding – and Mia refusing.
‘OK, Mum, I’ll come. I’ll come to New York.’
Part Six
July
Chapter 48
Jess
A deep sigh emerged from the back seat of the car, and Jess glanced in the rear-view mirror to where Mia was staring out of the window, chewing her thumbnail. She seemed distracted – anxious, almost – as though she cared more than anyone about whether or not Jess got on the plane. Jess still didn’t understand why Mia had insisted on accompanying them to the airport but it had been too early in the morning for an argument.
In the passenger seat next to Jess, Audrey was fiddling with something in her bag. Jess had first heard her pottering around at half past five this morning and had already watched her unpack and repack her hand luggage at least half a dozen times.
There had been so many moments during the past four weeks that Jess had wanted to sit next to her mum at the kitchen table, clear her throat and tell her that she was sorry, she’d spoken precipitately, she should never have agreed to the trip. So many nights since the concert at the Albert Hall, Jess had lain awake in bed wondering how five days in New York with her mum and Lily could be anything other than disastrous.
Mia sighed again, and Jess’s patience stretched like a rubber band on the brink of snapping. ‘What is it, Mia? You’ve been sighing in the back of the car ever since we left. I did say it was too early for you to come with us. You’re wasting the best part of a morning when you could be in the library.’
Out of the corner of her eye Jess saw her mum turn to look at Mia, glimpsed a silent communication pass between them. ‘Mia, what is it? Whatever it is, just tell me.’
Mia paused, and Jess detected another undecipherable look pass between them as her daughter fiddled with the silver stud in her ear.
‘OK. Well, the thing is … there’s something I haven’t been entirely honest with you about. You know those Saturday mornings I said I was going to the library or studying at a friend’s or whatever? Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Granny and I … We’ve been going to that art class at the Royal College together, the one I told you about …’
As Mia’s voice trailed off, the words took a few seconds to find form in Jess’s head, like numbers in a colour vision test emerging from a mass of dots. ‘You’ve been going to that art class together behind my back? I can’t believe you’ve been colluding in this, Mum. What on earth were you thinking?’
‘Don’t be cross with Granny. She really didn’t want me to lie to you, but she didn’t understand any more than I did why you were so adamant I couldn’t do it. It’s just one morning a week.’