So I kept going. “She made my father stay home to watch Katie that day, but I was with her. I’d just turned five a few days before, but I don’t remember it. Or much of her at all, really. My father won’t even mention her name, and he loses it if anyone else does.”
“Ruth came back to England when she heard about my mother. She’d said at one point, when I was older, that after my mother died, my father was useless. Couldn’t take care of us, couldn’t take care of himself. Literally, a disaster. So she stayed, and they got married, even though he doesn’t deserve her, even though he’d become someone else. And here we are now, one big happy family.”
That was what I remember telling Mara that day—more than I’d told anyone, certainly, but not quite the truth.
The truth is that I do remember when my mother died.
I remember her funeral: the air heavy with flowers, my grandmother’s perfume, and the picture they’d had of her in the chapel, wearing a cream-and-black-striped jumper, her blond hair pulled back in a messy ponytail at the base of her neck. The sleeves covered her hands, and she had her chin resting in one of them, her eyes crinkled at the corners, and she half smiled, quite deviously, at the camera. “You have her smile,” people said, and I remember looking into the casket at her face, wondering if that meant I’d taken it from her, and the wave of guilt that descended on me then.
Her eyes were closed, her skin waxy, her body fitted poorly into a dress I never remembered her wearing. My father had sat solemnly beside me, spine ramrod straight, his typically clean-shaven face now shadowed with days of stubble. Ruth wept openly as she stood beside the priest and spoke about Mum. I could hardly hear words through her sniffles and sobs.
My father, on the other hand—his face was nothing. He held Katie on his lap, and she was uncharacteristically quiet, her blue eyes looking bluer in her pale face, which looked paler in her little black frock and Mary Janes. Ruth wept until she couldn’t speak, and the priest, looking stricken at the open display of emotion, helped her down to her seat. She sat down beside me and took me in her arms, but I shook myself free. The room was filled with candles, tall ones, taller than I was, some of them, and I watched the wax drip onto the petal of a flower and wondered how much longer I’d be sitting there in that room with the thing that was and was not my mother.
I remember the moment she became that thing.
I remember the little gasp she made as someone pushed past her, and her head bowing forward before her hand loosened around mine.
I remember the red flowering her shirt under her jacket.
What I don’t remember is the face of the one who stabbed her. I don’t remember screaming for her or crying. And as I watched her dying, I don’t remember a look of surprise on her face or fear in her eyes, or seeing any sadness in her at all.
I remember seeing relief there, instead.
3
THE TONIC OF WILDNESS
WHEN I FINALLY SEE MARA, she’s no longer in sight of the chapel. She’s a small Bront? character silhouetted in black, standing in the shadow of a marble tower on top of a high hill; the mausoleum containing centuries of Shaw remains, perched between and overlooking the woods and the ruins. My absence in the chapel and presence on the grounds goes either unnoticed or undealt with, because no one stops me.
I stride alongside the man-made river that pulses through the grounds. The absence of sound vibrates inside me the farther I get from the chapel. The air is thick, and even the water seems to die beneath the spot where my girl stands.
Mara bows over the bridge, her hair cascading over her shoulders as though it’s reaching for the river. She casts a slim shadow over the water. “I didn’t think,” she says, possibly to herself.
I stand next to her, resting my elbows against the old stones. “About?”
“The horses.”
“Why would you? I didn’t. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine.”
Her face is in shadow—I can’t tell what she’s thinking, and I can’t hear her either—the air is unnaturally still, and my mind is as quiet now as it was loud before.
“Are they okay?” she asks.
“The horses? I’m sure they’re fine.”
“The humans?”
“I’m sure they’re fine too.”
“Are people freaking out?” A breeze ripples her curls and the water.
“The English don’t really ‘freak out.’ But I’m sure the guests are quietly aghast.”
She tilts her face to me, finally. Her eyes are impenetrable, but a slice of sun hits her shoulder, I feel her warmth through her clothes, then the softness of her skin as her fingers glance over my hand as we lean over the bridge together.
I don’t know what she’s thinking, but all I can think is that I want her against me, around me, enveloping me. I slide my hand around her waist, my fingers slipping beneath the waistband of her skirt, searching for skin.
She raises her eyebrows. “Won’t you be missed?”
I press her to me, bending so my lips graze her ear as I speak. “Probably. Ask me if I care.”
“Do you care?”
“Not even a little.”
By the time we reach the mausoleum, Mara’s breath is quick, her skin dewy. I pull her under the cold marble dome, between the columns that surround it, and press my mouth to hers, insistent, demanding. She softens against my lips, melts, and every moment is bursting—the hot slide of her tongue in my mouth, the bite of her teeth into my lower lip, and then the stiffening of her bones and muscles as her body pulls away and the tension in mine rises to a ferocious ache.
“Noah, we shouldn’t—”
“Shouldn’t . . . ?”
A resigned exhale. “We shouldn’t be here.”
“That’s precisely why we are here,” I say. I break away for one agonising moment, and the door creaks as I push it open and guide her inside.
The mausoleum is quite large, the size of a grand studio apartment in New York, perhaps. There’s a short marble altar in the centre, with Latin words and carved figures of the Four Ages of Man on each side: Infantia. Adolescentia. Virilitas. Senectas. I push her gently against Virilitas, but she pushes back.
“It’s your father’s funeral.”
“Well aware,” I say, leaning to kiss her neck. When she doesn’t move, I ask, “Do you find this inappropriate?”
“It’s . . . unusual,” she says.
“Would you like to go back?”
“Would you?”
I answer by raising her hips onto the altar and stand between her parted knees, her pleated skirt hitched up to reveal the paleness of her thighs. A slow glance slightly downward.
Her eyebrows lift as her lips part. “Are you serious?”
“Deadly.”
She bites her lower lip. “I don’t want you to regret not being there.”
“Won’t,” I say, slipping one hand beneath her shirt.
“How do you know?”
My mind returns to my mother’s funeral, my father staring at her coffin with dead eyes. “My father died the day my mother did. A monster took his place.”
“I know, but—”
“No, there’s nothing else. No one else. He’s gone—he can’t hurt anyone anymore. There’s no one and nothing in our way.” I pause, resting my fingers on the clasp of her bra. “We should celebrate.”
A laugh escapes her throat. “Not really your style.”
“No, but it is yours.”
Wide eyes slit into a cat’s slant. She bows her head, conceding. “Has anyone ever told you you use sex as a coping mechanism?”
“Yes, why?”
“Oh, no reason.” A pause fills the air. Then Mara arcs her body toward mine, her lips toward mine, and softly flicks her tongue into my mouth.