_____
When I picked up the phone, it was still light outside. And still deep in the comedown from last night at the fetish club, I was so pleased to hear your voice. Like coming home. I can shut this down; I can shut it all down and bask in the comfort of your voice.
I’ve since slithered down to sitting on the stone kitchen floor with the big old phone cradle on my outstretched legs, and I’m clutching the receiver firmly by the mouthpiece like a cricket ball. My ear’s getting hot, but I won’t swap. Not yet. I press the earpiece against my ear until the plastic creaks in protest.
This silence has been going on surreally long. More silent than silence, because you can hear the electrostatic crackle poised and ready to catch any sound. I draw in a great breath, exhale through my nose, and the digital noise fills my head. And yours too, no doubt.
“This is nice,” I murmur. “Spending time with you. Even when you’re two hundred miles away.”
“Yeah,” you say. “It is.”
I run my finger in between the numbers on the keypad of the phone cradle.
“I really miss spending time with you,” you say. “Even more than I thought I would.”
Silence. I can feel my brow furrowing. Are you trying to say something?
“So…I’m wondering if…”
You sigh, the bits and bytes flowing into my head, into my brain, making me close my eyes to tolerate it.
“Oh… What are you saying?” I groan.
“I don’t know what I’m saying. What am I saying? I’m saying I look at us, and I ask, why can’t they sort it out? And the only person I want to ask is you. I want to step back from it and talk with you about how you think it’s going to turn out for them.”
Short crackle. I risk a switch of ears with the receiver.
“You’re not like the rest of them,” you say. “But I have to be careful, Ivo. With a background like mine, you’ve got to understand, I have to be careful.”
“I want you to be careful,” I say. “I really, really want you to be careful. I mean, to the point that, if I’m going to bring you trouble, then…then I don’t want it to be me.”
Doot!
“What was that?”
“Oh, sorry,” I say. “I had my finger on the five, and I accidentally pressed it.”
There’s an added crackle on the line, and I know exactly the breathy chuckle you’ve just made.
The heat rises from my relieved lobe. Imagine it now, glowing in the gloom.
Doot!
“What was that?” I say.
“That was a one out of ten for not saying anything positive. Say something positive.”
“It feels lovely to laugh with you again.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t laugh anywhere near as much with anyone else.”
“No, nor me.”
Pause there.
That feels right.
That feels like what I mean.
You sigh, and another flood of static washes through my brain.
“What are we going to do?” you say.
“I’m not sure.”
“Nor me.”
Long, long pause.
“I can’t be rushed,” you say, finally. “I can only take it one day at a time. One hour at a time.”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
“And I suppose we have to trust that it’s going to take us somewhere—somewhere better than this.”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s work toward what makes sense.”
There’s another great long pause, and I have an ocean of relief dammed up and waiting to cascade all over me, but I don’t want to let it. No, no. Let it drip.
“How do you think it turns out for them?” you say.
“I don’t know. I really, really want it to turn out well.”
“Me too.”
“I love a happy ending.”
“Me too.”
“I’d better go,” I say. “My mum’s car just pulled into the driveway.”
I start to climb to my feet to sound busy. No car. I just want to stop this now. Quit while we’re ahead.
“I’ll call again tomorrow. Is that OK?”
“OK. Yeah.”
“I’d better go.”
“Yeah.”
You pause once more, and we both must realize this at the same time.
“I want to say I love you,” you say. “That’s what I used to say at this point.”
“Mmm.”
“Bluh blah bloo.”
“Yeah. Bluh blah bloo too.”
• • •
Shocked awake now, think—I’m fucking drowning.
Push the button, push, push… I—
Sheila in, with urgency. “Are you all right?”
“Drowning… I’m—”
“OK, OK, now…”
Mask pressed to my nose and mouth. Pressed firmly.
I don’t know where.
Ask questions, ask—
What’s the day—? It’s—?
I have no idea. I don’t even know where to start to find something like that out.
What was the day yesterday?
I—?
Sheila spiders out her hands and threads the elastic of the mask back over my head. It snaps tight above my ears.
“OK, lovey. Now breathing, yes? You know the drill.”
“Breathing, breathing.”
“And it looks like it’s time for a little more of the morphine solution, OK?”
“OK, yeah.”
Yeah, yeah.
She starts to move around in the now familiar morphine routine. Methodically get the bottle. Strange, formal little movements. She doesn’t want to get anything wrong. Top responsibility, the drugs.
“Down the hatch.”
• • •
“Here we are, at last,” I say, arriving finally on the crest of the hill.
You follow on behind, pushing down with your hands on your knee to lever yourself up the final incline. You fall in breathlessly beside me and slip your hands around my middle as I drop my arm across your shoulders and squeeze you tight: the anxious clinch of a couple once lost to one another, now reunited. It feels so good to be holding each other after everything we’ve come through.
A day at a time, then a week, and all’s well.
All’s well.
“My favorite place in the world,” I say.
Up here we’re more in touch with this deep, deep sky than the valley down below. Huge gray-white clouds bloom epically in the blue.
Beneath us, the land drops away and sweeps off down the valley. A tiny cyclist lends perspective, cranking herself east along the dirt track toward town. She’s farther away than seems possible.
“This is where my dad’s ashes are scattered,” I say. “I remember me and Mum and Laura coming out here and doing that.”
“It’s a beautiful spot. Perfect.”
“I think my mum left it a couple of years before we scattered him. She wanted us to be old enough to remember.”
We carefully lay out the blanket on a clean patch of ground—the blanket now happily being used for what you intended—and you sit. I sit down behind you and thread my arms around your middle, rest my chin on your shoulder.
“Whoever first used the word rolling about hills knew exactly what they were talking about,” you say. “These hills really roll.”
“They’re exactly the right size and roundness.”
“And millions of colors. Really like a picture-book green, and then if you look at it long enough you start to see all the yellows and browns coming through. Purple skirting the bottoms.”
“Could you make a blanket out of those colors?”
“Nature’s got that one covered,” you say.
You pull out an apple and bite into it. I lift my head from your shoulder, and you let me take a bite too.
“So,” I say, “I’ve been invited to join the garden design course.”
“Ah, really? Well done! I think you’ll be great at it,” you say. Then: “You’re going to be sick through nerves again, aren’t you?”
“Can’t wait.”
“No, I think you’re going to get in there, and you’re totally going to blossom.”
You back into me for a tight cuddle and draw my arms tighter around you.
“This feels so good,” you say.
“Yeah.”
“It doesn’t feel like living day by day anymore. Not to me. Does it to you?”
No… No, it feels…just right.
You draw in a deep breath and exhale languorously.
“Do you think, when you die—”
“OK… Nice—”
“—that the ash when you get cremated is the same ash people use on their gardens?”
“I don’t know.”
“Aren’t you supposed to know things like that if you’re going to do a garden design course?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
I laugh.
“What?”
“Why do you always take us to the darkest places?”
“Do I? I think nursing might have broken my darkness filter.”
“So, when you’re a nurse, do you get immune to people dying?”
You chew thoughtfully for a moment.
“No,” you say, “not immune. If you know you’ve done the best in your power to help this person, then…well, the alternative is that you weren’t there and you didn’t help.”
“I suppose.”
“You have a job to do, to help them, and you just have to do your best. Sometimes I almost think it’s quite a selfish thing to do—the better job you do, the more self-respect you can have. I tried explaining that to one of the women on my course, and she looked at me like I was gone out.”
You examine the apple to select the next best bite.
“I get that.”
“I always think it’s worse when you see the family. You can’t do a lot for them. There’s no time. And you can’t really prescribe to take away people’s grief.”
“Not properly, no.”
“And you see little kids, like the doctors and nurses might have looked at you when your dad died, and you think—there’s a lot of loving that person needs, right there.”
You fling the apple core down the valley, watch it catch now and nestle in the bracken.
Crickle crackle.
“Well, that’s one way of deciding where you want to place your apple tree,” I say.
You grin at me and give me an appley kiss, smack on the lips, and we lie down on the blanket, huddle in close.
“If I were ash,” you say, your voice washed out as you talk into the air, “I’d like to be sprinkled under a fruit tree. Or if it’s the wrong kind of ash, I’d like to be buried under a fruit tree. Worm food.”
“Yeah?” My voice bassy and loud in my ears.
“Because then the nutrients from me would go to swelling the fruit. And then maybe the birds would peck at the fruit and get the energy to fly—so the same energy that is making me say these words now would be used to help the bird fly. I’d literally be flying.”
“Yeah…yeah.”
“And that to me is truly comforting. Seeing myself, launching off from this hill and diving down there into the sky, down there in the valley. Deep down, and up around. Everywhere.”
You hold your hands up to the sky, cross them, palms downward, pressing your thumbs together to make a bird. A fluttering bird.
I take my right hand, press it to your left, thumb to thumb.
A bird. A fluttering bird.
Hold our hands against the sky.
Fluttering, fluttering in the blue.
At that moment, I hear the signature squiggles of birdsong in the distance and a brief flutter of wings, and a look of childlike delight crosses your face.