Mark’s fingers brush mine but we don’t hold hands. It is enough that he’s beside me, enough that we’re talking. The house has been on the market for three weeks. I don’t know what we’ll do when it sells. We might buy a smaller place together. We might choose to live apart. I might go to nursing college. I might not. Billy’s disappearance revealed a lot about my relationship with my husband—good and bad—and I need to decide what I can live with and what I can’t. I’m certain Mark was telling me the truth when he said he had no idea why Billy had defaced the photo album and that he didn’t have the strength for another argument, not when there were so many other things stressing him out. But he did lie when I asked him if he knew where it was. And he tried to kiss another woman. I need to decide whether I can forgive him for that and whether I would be happier with or without him. But there’s no hurry to make that kind of decision. There are some things you can’t force. Some things only time will reveal.
“Do you think Jake will be okay?” Mark asks as we walk past a faded sign offering one donkey ride for £3, two for a fiver.
“Just a second.” I dip down to undo my shoes. When I shake them out there’s half a sandcastle’s worth of sand in each one.
“Jake will be fine,” I say as we continue to walk. Mark in his sneakers, me barefoot, despite the biting November wind. “Living with mates will be good for him. They won’t let him wallow.”
It’s a new start for him. A clean slate. I drove to Chew Valley the day after we saw Kira in the hospital and I threw the tote and knife into the lake. There are days when I wonder whether it was the right decision, whether I should have told DS Forbes about the pedophile Jake met. He might have been jailed, taken off the streets so he couldn’t go looking for other boys. Or Jake might have been the one that ended up behind bars. It was a risk I couldn’t take. Not after everything he’d been through.
“Practically, I mean.” Mark says. “He’s never so much as boiled an egg. You’ll have to give him lessons.”
“He’d love that”—I smile—“his mum popping around in her pinny! Honestly, Mark, he’ll be fine. He’s made of stern stuff.”
He gives me a sideways glance. “Like you.”
I felt anything but stern stuff at Billy’s funeral. I managed to keep it together all the way through the ceremony but my knees buckled at the graveside and Jake and Mark had to prop me up. There was no holding back the tears as Billy’s coffin was lowered into the ground. We all cried as we said our final goodbyes. No one cared who saw, least of all me.
Billy’s friends had asked us if they could graffiti his coffin. We talked about it for a long time. Mark said no, immediately. He wanted our son to have a normal funeral, he wanted to have his death taken seriously, not marred by strange and obscure tags and designs on his final resting place. I was torn. Billy wanted to be remembered. In one of the text messages the police found on his phone he’d told Kira that he wanted to be infamous, that he wanted the world to see his tags and know that Billy Wilkinson had existed. But the world does know that Billy existed, at least our small part of it. We deliberately avoided the papers when the police released the news of his death. We closed our doors to the reporters and photographers who turned up on our doorstep. We hid ourselves away from the world, the world that knew that our younger child was dead, and we grieved in private. Billy wanted to tag buildings but it is our brains that his name is inscribed upon, our lives that have been transformed through knowing him, our hearts that have been forever changed.
Finally we said no to the coffin being graffitied. We wanted it to be new, untainted, untouched by the world, just as Billy was when he was born. He was such a beautiful baby. The moment he was in my arms I pressed my nose into his hair and inhaled the heady softness of him and my heart swelled with love. My child, my second child. We had created him—me and Mark. We had produced another perfect little boy. I felt blessed. I knew enough women who’d suffered miscarriages to know how very, very blessed I was to have conceived, carried and birthed a healthy child. I don’t believe in God but doing it twice in a row felt like a miracle. He was a miracle. And he had his whole life ahead of him. A life of joy and fun, love and adventure. He could have been anything, done anything but all I ever wanted was for him to be happy.
We tried to be good parents. We did everything we could for our children. We clothed them, fed them, played with them and loved them but one of them slipped from our fingers. One of them let go when we told him to hang on.
Why did that happen? Where did we go wrong?
That was the question we asked ourselves, over and over again, in the days that followed the funeral. We hid behind closed curtains, side by side on the sofa, sheltering in the dimly lit living room as we tore ourselves apart. Had we been too hard on him? Too soft? Too judgmental? Too lenient? Mark blamed himself. It was his fault, he said. His fault for letting Billy down, for letting him see a moment of weakness instead of setting him an example. If he hadn’t cried, he kept saying, if he hadn’t tried to kiss Edie Christian, then Billy never would have done what he did. He wouldn’t have thrown a rock at Mark’s car, fought with his brother or taken his anger out on Kira. He wouldn’t have died.
Billy was his own person.
That’s what I told Mark. Our son had already made some bad decisions before he overheard the conversation in the car park, before he saw the kiss through the pub window. He’d already rebelled against us and his school. And that came from nowhere, or from hormones, or from growing up and realizing that actually the world doesn’t hand you your dreams on a plate. You need to work for your dreams and even then, sometimes they still don’t come true. That’s a hard thing to wrap your head around when you’re fifteen and you’ve been told as a child that you can be, or do, anything you want in life. The one thing Billy’s death has taught me is that happiness doesn’t always lie in the future and in any success you hope might come your way. It’s in the here and now. It’s in your children throwing their arms around your neck and pressing wet lips to your cheek. It’s in the laughter of friends. In a walk or a run or just breathing in and out. It’s in surprises, in day-to-day comforts, in a voice on the telephone, the warmth of an embrace, the soft gaze of someone who loves you. You never know how much you have, you never realize how much you’ve got to be grateful for, until it’s snatched away from you. Cherish every moment. Cherish your life and all its ups and downs. Cherish the lives of those you love. We’re only here for a short time, so much shorter than you might think.
“Has Jake heard from Kira?” Mark tenses ever so slightly as he says her name, unsure how I’ll react.
I shake my head. “Not recently. They exchanged a few texts but he found it too upsetting. He asked her not to contact him again.”
“Right.” Mark digs the toes of his shoes into the sand as he walks, leaving small ridges behind him as we head toward the pier. “Have you heard from her?”
“Not since the card.”
“The one asking us to forgive her?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you? Forgive her, I mean?”
A cloud passes over the sun and I wrap my arms around my body as the wind bites at my thin cardigan.
“I already have. Billy too.”
We pass silently under the thick metal struts of the pier. By the time we come out the other side the sun has reappeared from behind the clouds.
“Look at that!” Mark points into the distance where two young boys, bundled up in coats and hats, are running along the beach side by side trying, and failing, to launch their kites into the air. “Reminds me of our two.”
“I remember that holiday.” I catch his eye and smile. “We kept telling them to just buy one kite and take it in turns to be the one that ran with it and the one that threw it up in the air, but they insisted on having one each.”
“And neither of them could get their kites into the air.”
“Until we stepped in to help.”
Now we watch as the boys charge up and down the sand laughing and shouting and tripping over their own feet as their parents point and smile and take photos.
One day those boys will be teenagers and they won’t look to their parents for reassurance anymore. They’ll make their own decisions and come up with their own definitions of right and wrong. I blamed myself for Billy’s disappearance for far too long. For not understanding what was going on in his head. For not knowing what he was up to. For not being there when he needed me. But you can’t hold your children forever. You have to let them choose their own path and hope that, if they choose the wrong one, they’ll come back to you and reach for your hand.
As I gaze across the sand, one hand raised to shield my eyes from the sun, it’s Billy and Jake racing across the beach and throwing their kites up into the air. They play until they get bored and then Jake points out to sea and Billy nods excitedly. The sea is further than it looks, maybe a quarter of a mile from where we’re standing. The kids will have to wade through thick mud before they reach it. But they don’t care. They whoop with delight, their faces tipped up to the sun as they speed toward the sea without looking back. I could call them back. I could tell them the mud is dangerous. I could tell them they won’t make it.
I let them run.