If Harry’s death shattered me, it was finally telling Sybil the truth—even though she refused to believe it and I’d got it wrong—that put me together again. The moment the words were out, Harry’s pact broken, I no longer felt that my brain was bursting out of my skull. Slowly, I began to think about the hour after that one, the next day, the next week. The skin at the backs of my knees started to heal, the rash never to return.
Yearning to feel grass between my toes, smell rain falling on a fresh clean river again, I took up Sybil’s offer of a restorative stay at Applecote, a house I hadn’t bothered to visit for years, wrapped up in my own crashing affairs. As I drove apprehensively through its gates, wondering if I was making yet another mistake, there was Billy standing on tiptoe, tying baby-pink roses to a trellis. A man I’d returned to in my thoughts many times during those intervening years, as if something between us had been left unfinished. The front of his T-shirt had ridden up, revealing the hard ridges of his stomach, like sand on a beach as the tide goes out. And I knew.
Ma didn’t live forever, as we all thought she would, although she outlived Jack by twenty years. We gathered around as her body failed, firing questions before it was too late. Was Pa’s accident really an accident? “Oh yes, darling,” she wheezed, and I realized that, like Sybil with Audrey, Ma would always stick doggedly to her own version of events and curate our family history. Why has Dot grown to look so uncannily like Jack? “I suppose it is just possible he was her father,” Ma finally conceded. She squeezed Dot’s hand. “I’m tired, darling. Let’s talk when I’m better.” But she didn’t get better. We laid her to rest in an emerald-green gown next to Pa. We miss her still. But as I pull away from Cornton Hall, leaving the last traces of Harry behind, the Margot who once loved him, and head out of the valley on the road home, I think how much easier this afternoon will be without her.
Ma always loathed good-byes.
Billy meets me with a cup of tea. He guesses where I’ve been. We stand there, holding each other, his large, rough hands delicately cupping my face, and I think how my younger self would have been incredulous that you can be gray and wrinkled and still in love.
After a pasta lunch I’m far too nervous to eat, I scout around our spring garden for just the right posy—a greeny-white tulip, fern leaves—and bind it in kitchen twine. I pull on an elegant dress—if one is born plain, one must compensate by dressing well, Ma imprinted that on me—but flat shoes. I stack the cakes carefully in the trunk.
As Billy drives away, I glance anxiously out of the window at the trees bending, their leaves rattling. We could have done without the gusting wind.
Paul, Sybil’s favorite nurse, meets us at the entrance of the care home—the dispatch center, Pam wickedly calls it—a modern, ugly building that we chose for its kind staff and well-tended gardens. He runs me quickly through Sybil’s state of health, which changes hourly, suspended precariously in the twilight zone of her great age: she’s well this afternoon, had a reasonable night, and, yes, a little lunch. She’s been very quiet but seems to grasp what it all means. (Unlike the letters: “What letters, dear?” I remain wholly unconvinced by her amnesia about those, even knowing the way her memory loops and weaves.) Paul pats my arm. It is the right thing, Margot, he reassures me.
God, I hope he’s right.
Sybil seems quite cheerful. She is already in her wheelchair, organized for an outing, a crocheted blanket tucked over her knees; on top of the blanket, her trusty crocodile handbag, just in case. Her hair—what remains of it—has been specially set into wispy spun-sugar curls by one of the nurses. Seeing me and Billy, she lights up and presses her twisted hands on the arms of the wheelchair, forgetting that she can no longer lift her own featherweight. Since the news broke, the transparent parchment of her skin has shrunk even tighter over her skeleton, so her body looks mummified, every vein and bone visible. She is much closer to the end. The fight—the maternal force that kept her going all these years—has completely gone. She sleeps a lot now, asleep far more than awake, like the time between ticks lengthening as an old pocket watch runs down.
“All ready, Sybil?” Billy maneuvers the wheelchair forward.
She clutches her handbag, bunching the bulbs of her knuckles. “I’ve been ready a long time, Billy dear.”
Billy tucks the sapling into the Applecote soil, a crab apple that sings out each spring with ballerina-pink blossom. I picture its roots sucking up the rich water that rises here in the Wilderness, where the old well once tunneled deep into the earth; Audrey and I dangling from a branch, the clamp of skin and moss; Ma on a chaise in Chelsea, blossom drifting across the drawing-room floor. So many things. All connected. Still connecting. Not quite finished.
My sisters and I daren’t look at one another. We cry at everything these days. Laugh at the wrong moments, too, a particular risk this afternoon since the five red helium balloons—one for Audrey and each of us, eager for the flight Audrey once dreamed of—are snapping madly on their strings in the high wind, Pam struggling to control them. Romy, our sweet uninvited guest, escaped from the house, is standing by the wheelchair, peering at Sybil with grave fascination, as if my aunt were a museum exhibit she’s forbidden to touch.
“What does this little girl think of the tree?” Sybil asks as the wind cracks the blanket on her lap.
Romy considers this surprising question from the relic, fiddles with the pocket of her blue pinafore. “Not big.”
“Little is nice, too,” Sybil says. “Like you.”
“Romy not little.”
“No. I’d say you’re just right.” Sybil smiles. She is reaching out to touch Romy’s cheek when Jessie runs up, flustered.
“I’m so, so sorry. You gate-crasher, Romy! Come here.” She scoops up her adorable little girl and carries her through the budding green trees back to the house. Sybil stares after them longingly, her smile fading. The wind blows harder. The balloon strings tangle in Pam’s excitable gray hair.
“Bloody things,” Pam mutters, clicking her tongue like Ma.
Flora laughs. “Just give them to me, Pam.”
“No, no, I can manage.” Pam sniffs. “I’m hardly going to lift off the ground.” She grips the strings in her fist and yanks them hard, like the leads of her unruly terriers. “Let’s get on with it, shall we, Margot?”
“Good idea. I can no longer feel my toes.” Flora stepped off the plane an hour late, still dressed for California in white linen and gold sandals.
“I did warn you, Flora.” Pam glances down approvingly at her own navy wool coat and sensible boots. “You do have a short memory.”
“Not that short,” Flora replies softly. And we all nod, silent for a moment, knowing exactly what she means. It still feels like yesterday. It still lives inside us.