At some point in the middle of that long, fretful night, Bea pulled out all the photos she had from America and spread them across the kitchen table. She hadn’t looked at them in years. On the ship back to England, and for the first few months she was home, she had gone through them at least once a day, flipping through them like a pack of cards. The edges were cracked and limp, and some of the photos had begun to fade. A photo of her, William, and Gerald from the beginning: could it have been the first day of school? How young they were. How much time had passed. She’d now been back longer than she was gone.
In the morning, when she woke up and needed to remember all over again, she decided to put the photos in some sort of order, but there wasn’t enough room on the table, so she put them on the floor, stretching from the front hall through the living room. And then she remembered that she had another stash of photos, ones that Mrs. G had sent over the years since she had been back, and so she added those to the originals, stretching the line into the kitchen.
Bea had never shown her mother any of those later photos and only some of the early ones. She knew the later photos would only annoy her. Her mother seemed to want to forget about the Gregorys, to erase the time in America. She wanted Bea to do so as well. Bea showed her one photo, early on, maybe the photo of William at his convocation, with William and Gerald and Mr. G in those ridiculous crimson bow ties, and Mrs. G in that maroon hat with the feathers, and Mum had sniffed. Those people, she said, and Bea felt those words as though she had been slapped. Those people were people she loved. People she missed. She learned it was better to stop talking about them, to keep them to herself.
She was on her knees crawling around the flat, getting each photo in the right place, when the buzzer rang. She wasn’t dressed for company, and as she stood, she pulled her hair back into a loose ponytail. “Hello?” she said, somewhat softly, not wanting to answer the door, worried that it might be the annoying woman from downstairs who always wanted to borrow something. There was no answer, and so she crept to the door, hoping that whoever it was would just go away, but then there was an odd knock, a single knock and then another. It sort of sounded like the code, the series of knocks they had made up all those years ago, and she was right by the door, so she flung it open and there he was. William. He looked the same, of course, but all grown up. Exhausted and sad but there was joy there, too. Such a mixture of sorrow and happiness.
“Oh, William,” she said. “It’s you.”