“I love you, too, Oliver.”
“You know, having them all gone doesn’t have to be a bad thing. We can snog on the couch again in peace.”
“True.”
“We can snog all over, in fact. We’ve never done it on the path.”
“Ha-ha!” I slapped his leg, “Imagine that! On all these stones? I get the top!”
“Yeah, on second thought, that’s probably not the best idea.” He pulled himself up and helped me to my feet, “I’m starving. Let’s go eat some of your supper, Love. And when we’re done I’ll give you a right good snogging. Test the waters, you know, see if I still got it.”
“Oh, you still got it,” I assured him.
We walked back to the house hand in hand.
After getting cake smashed in my face, Oliver and I were back to our old ways again; pawing each other on the couch, swimming naked in the pond, throwing dirt at each other. We made love on the lawn and slept in the sun when we were through. We stayed up late at night wrapped in that old woollen blanket watching the sky. Oliver kept up his medical practice and I tended the garden. We both went together and talked to the winds and the trees and left sweets for the Lord and the Lady and their boon, of which they now had many more.
I got used to the cabin being quiet again and fell back into being who I was before the children came along, Just Silvia, Oliver Dickinson’s wife. And, as we always had been, we were happy once more.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Once of the tricks about life is that it’s always changing. Sometimes the changes are good. Sometimes you think they’re good and you end up disappointed. Other times you think life has handed you a lemon and it turns out to be a diamond. And there are other times when it just is what it is. It’s not what you wanted, but there’s nothing you can do about it, so you just have to accept what’s happened and go on. Those are the toughest times in my book, the times when you simply have no choice and life just does what it wants without even asking what anybody thinks.
There had always been a hole in my heart, a space that my mother had left when she died. Most of my life I’d kept so busy that I didn’t take the time to know it. I recognized that there was a disconnection inside of me when it came to my family. By the time I was a teenager I’d become so engrossed in Oliver and his family and in ingraining myself into it that that I’d left my own blood far behind as if it never mattered. But the truth was that it did matter and as I got older, I began to feel a nagging inside. I was a Scot, born in the Highlands, and living in Wales. I missed my homeland. I began to think more and more about my ancestors, the men and women who had come before me, who had fought and died on the same soil that their father’s had. The same soil under which my mother now rested. The same soil I had left behind.
Sharon Mariana Nettles. My mother. Born twenty years before me. Married my father. That was all I knew of the woman who had given me life.
It haunted me more and more that I couldn’t remember her. Sometimes when I was home alone and it was very, very quiet, I’d try. I’d sit with my eyes closed and allow my mind to wander. I had flashes, bits of impressions and snapshot-like memories. Blurbs of a woman standing at the side of a bed with her cool hand pressed against my hot cheek or a woman in a red jacket walking briskly down the street pushing a pram. I could almost hear her, “Come along, Silvia! Faster, Darling! Quit splashing in puddles! Your baby sister can’t get wet like we can!”
It always left me with a sigh. Was it even her? I couldn’t be sure. No matter what I did, I couldn’t see her face. I knew what she looked like in photos, so I knew I‘d recognize her if I could only just see her.
I’d talk myself all together out of thinking it was her I remembered. It may not have been. It may have been Gran, whom I did remember. Gran had taken care of Lucy and me so much after Mummy died. The truth was that I would probably never even know. I had only blurry images and ideas, but nothing concrete. I remembered some of the things I did after she was gone. I remember being told that she was with the angels. I didn’t really know what an angel was, so I several times a day I’d go to the window and sit, watching for a car to pull up and have the angels leave her off. I remembered writing a letter and sticking it in the letter box at Gran’s. It was addressed to heaven and I had asked for God to send my mother home. If he couldn’t, I asked for him to give her a drawing that I had enclosed.
I had no one I could ask about her other than my father. My mother had been an only child. I knew of no cousins on her side, or of any great aunts or uncles who still lived. It was apparent that I was going to have to speak to my father if I wanted to know anything, but I was afraid to do it. The thought of breeching that gap with him, of actually inspiring a response, sent me into convulsions.
He had never reacted to anything. Not when I did something bad as a child, not when I succeeded in school, not when I ran away and got married under-age or graduated university or had babies. He’d made the required phone calls, shown up for the required visits, given the appropriate congratulations and simply left. But the subject of my mother had been very different. I remembered him after she died. Him, sitting in the living room with his head between his knees, sobbing. I remembered him sinking to his bottom in the grass at the cemetery on a rare visit. I remembered creeping out of my bedroom one night, very late, to find him in the kitchen with a female friend of my mother‘s, a thick glass of brandy in his hand, and I’d asked in a whisper if Mummy was ever coming home.
He looked at me and made a hard face. His eyes narrowed and he glared. He looked at me as if he hated me, like he’d have slapped my teeth out of my mouth if I had been standing any closer. Then he turned from me and gave the same look to the refrigerator.
“Get back to your bed! “ The friend said harshly, making a move toward me as if she was going to strike me, “Stop talking your nonsense! Leave your father alone!”
I spun and ran back to my room I accidentally slammed the door behind me. Lucy, four months old, howled for a moment. I heard my father go to her and the friend mumble something about damning me for my stupidity.
I hid under the duvet. That was when I understood what dead meant. That was the moment when I knew she was never coming back. That was the moment that the innocent little child that was me ceased to exist. It was the moment that I stopped trusting my dad. I knew to never ask about her again and I never did. His response to my question had made it very clear that she was a subject better left untouched. Anything I might have remembered as a child slowly faded from my mind.
But there were still traces of her. When I was eight I found a woman’s tortoise shell comb in his dresser as I was putting away his pants. He saw it in my hand and froze in the doorway. His face draw back as if he’d been stabbed. The silence that followed left me with a horrible sense of shame as if I’d done something terrible, yet I had no idea exactly what it was.
And so my mother became a stranger to me, someone who had left me before I had the chance to know her.
My own children were grown and gone. From time to time they’d phone me, each of them, and we’d chat. The whole time somewhere in the back of my heart there was an ache that hadn‘t been there when they were small. After all those years, after having raised my own children, I finally had time to realise what my mother and I had lost. It was each other. I finally had time to miss her and mourn her passing the way I should have when I was a child.
Time passed and I still said nothing to my father. It was Oliver who sat with me at night and listened to my frustration, who didn’t call me mad for crying over a woman who’d died so long ago that I couldn’t even remember her.
“You lost somebody, Sweetie,” He’d say as he smoothed back my hair, “You lost somebody you loved. Maybe it happened a long time ago, but it still happened. In a way, it’s good that you’re finally sad about it. I’m glad that there was enough of a bond there that you can feel that now, all these years later. It’s safe to feel it. You’re safe. It means that she loved you as well…more than you knew…so much that a part of you is still mourning her, yeah?”